Data collection campaign with MARSE Radar for VHR SAR imaging

Inhalt:
From December 2006 to June 2007, a French Mod funded airborne campaign was conducted in France. The main objective was to generate a database of both radar and EOS data in support of future Air to Ground studies. THALES and ONERA were involved. This paper focuses on THALES SAR data collection. This campaign offered the first flight trials opportunity for the THALES radar prototype called MARSE. MARSE can collect SAR data with respect to a wide range of SAR modes (high resolution-long range-wide swath-high recording capabilities). That makes it perfectly suitable for building a SAR database dedicated to both fire control applications and UAV applications (as required by French Mod). This paper focuses on High Resolution SAR imaging at long range, using long collecting time (up to 1 minute). Actually, the collected data was used to assess the SAR processing capabilities for getting high quality images with low computation load.