COSMO-SkyMed SAR Satellite

COSMO-SkyMed (COnstellation of small Satellites for Mediterranean basin Observation) is the largest Italian investment in Space Systems for Earth Observation, commissioned and funded by Italian Space Agency (ASI) and Italian Ministry of Defense (MoD), and it is “natively” conceived as a Dual-Use (Civilian and Defence) end-to-end Earth Observation System aimed to establish a global service supplying provision of data, products and services compliant with well-established international standards and relevant to a wide range of applications, such as Risk Management, Scientific and Commercial Applications and Defence/Intelligence Applications.

The system consists of a constellation of four Low Earth Orbit mid-sized satellites, each equipped with a multi-mode high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operating at X-band and fitted with particularly flexible and innovative data acquisition and transmission equipment.

The system is completed by dedicated full featured Ground infrastructures for managing the constellation and granting ad-hoc services for collection, archiving and distribution of acquired remote sensing data.

COSMO-SkyMed SAR Products Overview

The COSMO-SkyMed SAR instrument can be operated in different beam which include:
· Spotlight (mode 2 and mode 1) (Note: mode 1 is for Defence use only and is not further described)
· Stripmap (himage and pingpong)
· Scansar (wideregion or hugeregion)

The characteristics of SAR measurement modes

• SPOTLIGHT, allowing SAR images with spot extension of 10.x10. km2 and spatial resolution equal to 1.x1. m2 single look;
• STRIPMAP (HIMAGE achieving medium resolution, wide swath imaging, with swath extension 340 km and spatial resolution of 3x3 m2 single look;
• STRIPMAP (PINGPONG), achieving medium resolution, medium swath imaging with two radar polarization’s selectable among HH, HV, VH and VV, a spatial resolution of 15 meters on a swath 330 km;
• SCANSAR (WIDE and HUGE region), achieving radar imaging with swath extension selectable from 100.x 100. km2 (WIDE REGION) to 200.x 200 km2 (HUGE REGION), and a spatial resolution selectable from 30x30. m2 to 100.x100 m2

The orbit characteristics

The major classes of COSMO SAR products

The COSMO-SkyMed products are divided in the following major classes:

The SAR Higher Level products, suited for mid or even high level remote sensing applications, are composed by the following products:

Service products are used internally either like auxiliary data for production chain or like further analysis performed on all products delineated above. Such product are basically constituted by the Orbital product and the Quality Control product.