PAZ-SAR

The objective of the PAZ-SAR instrument is to provide high quality SAR imagery in a variety of sizes and resolution ranging from medium over wide regions up to very high resolution (e.g. meter and sub-meter). Operational flexibility with multi-mode, multi-polarization and left and right looking attitude is one of the major PAZ System requirements leading to a quite large number of different instrument configurations and antenna beams. The PAZ-SAR instrument comprises an X-band active phased array antenna with an operation instantaneous bandwidth up to 300 MHz. The SAR antenna (with a size of 4.8 m x 0.7 m) consists of 12 panels in azimuth direction – assembled in three mechanical leaves – each with 32 dual-polarized subarrays. Each individual subarray is driven by a TRM (Transmit-Receive Module) adjustable in amplitude and phase by applying complex excitation coefficients.