Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2024, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (10): 1881-1895.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2024.20230263.

• Major Satellite Surveying and Mapping Project “LuTan-1” • Previous Articles    

Key technologies for spaceborne SAR payload of LuTan-1 satellite system

Yunkai DENG(), Yu WANG, Kaiyu LIU, Naiming OU, Dacheng LIU, Heng ZHANG(), Jili WANG   

  1. Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
  • Received:2023-06-30 Published:2024-11-26
  • Contact: Heng ZHANG E-mail:ykdeng@mail.ie.ac.cn;zhangheng@aircas.ac.cn
  • About author:DENG Yunkai (1962—), male, researcher, PhD supervisor, majors in the design of spaceborne imaging radar systems, basic imaging theory and microwave remote sensing theory research. E-mail: ykdeng@mail.ie.ac.cn
  • Supported by:
    The National Key Research and Development Program of China(2017YFB0502700);The National Natural Science Foundation of China(61825106)

Abstract:

LuTan-1 (referred as LT-1) is China's first civil synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite mission to monitor the ground deformation with high precision by differential interferometry technology. The LT-1A and LT-1B have been success-fully launched on January 26 and February 27, 2022, respectively. The data acquisition schedule of LT-1 mission is divided into two stages, which corresponding to two specific orbit configurations. In the first stage, two satellites fly in a compact formation to get the digital elevation model (DEM) using the bistatic InSAR strip mode. In the second stage, both satellites fly in a common reference orbit with 180° separation. The revisit time of the individual satellite is 8 days, and it can be reduced to 4 days with two satellites. LT-1 satellite constellation can stably obtain time series data, so that we can monitor the ground deformation with high precision. Moreover, the multi-mode polarimetric payload will be utilized to obtain single-pass multi-polarimetric InSAR and hybrid polarimetric SAR data for forestry, land resource surveys, disaster monitoring, etc. In this paper, the key technologies of the LT-1 SAR payload, including phase synchronization, ambiguity suppression and system calibration, are systematically described and analyzed.The maximum resolution of LT-1 is 3 m, and the maximum swath width is 400 km, respectively. The azimuth ambiguity-to-signal ratio (AASR) of the interference wave position is better than -20 dB.The performance is partially demonstrated by ground testing and on-orbit actual measurement data.

Key words: LT-1, phase synchronization, system calibration, polarimetric SAR, ambiguity suppression

CLC Number: