A Novel Expandable SAR Satellite System for Emergency Observation in Natural Disaster

Space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is playing an important role, with all weather and all time observation capability, in monitoring of earthquake, flood, typhoon and other nature disasters. It is crucial to make timely accurate evaluation of disasters for emergency rescue, damage assessment and follow-up solution. This paper introduces the concept of a novel expandable microsatellite system for emergency observation based on Ka-band Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) SAR system. It is composed of a set of mutually separated transmitter and receiver satellites. By adopting Time Modulated Antenna Array (TMA) concept, the weight and costs of the satellites will be significantly reduced. With autonomous task planning, this system can provide high-resolution results in a short time to support the action.