A MirrorSAR-based single-pass dual-baseline SAR interferometer for the generation of very high quality DEMs

Abstract:
In this paper we demonstrate that a multistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system consisting of a single-pass dual-baseline interferometer is able to provide Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) with unprecedented quality in terms of resolution and vertical accuracy. Such topographic maps may reach the HRTI-4 standard, with 6 m independent posting and a point-to-point height accuracy of 0:8 m for a 90% confidence interval. Compared to the HRTI-3 DEM from TanDEM-X, this means an improvement by one order of magnitude if one considers both the better height accuracy and the improved spatial resolution. The present paper provides an efficient and cost-effective implementation of the proposed single-pass dual-baseline SAR mission, based on the recently proposed MirrorSAR concept. It consists of a single transmit-only spacecraft, and three receive-only satellites. Interferometric performance figures are provided for future mission studies where the proposed MirrorSAR-based mission configuration has been employed and refined.