Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rosenqvist, A.
• Shimada, M.
• Ito, N.
• Watanabe, M.

Titel

ALOS PALSAR: A Pathfinder Mission for Global-Scale Monitoring of the Environment

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 2007-11, Vol.45 (11), p.3307-3316

Ort / Verlag

New York: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) is Japan's new-generation Earth Observation satellite, launched in January 2006 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. ALOS carries two optical instruments (Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping and Advanced Visible and Near-Infrared Radiometer type 2) and, to maintain Japan's commitment to spaceborne L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), the Phased Array L-band SAR (PALSAR). The successor to the SAR onboard the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (1992-1998), the PALSAR instrument provides enhanced sensor characteristics, including full polarimetry, variable off-nadir viewing, and ScanSAR operations, as well as significantly improved radiometric and geometric performance. As important as the technical improvements and the reason PALSAR here is referred to as a pathfinder mission for global environmental monitoring is the systematic data-acquisition strategy which has been implemented for ALOS. With a priority second only to emergency observations, the PALSAR observation strategy has been designed to provide consistent, wall-to-wall observations at fine resolution of all land areas on the Earth on a repetitive basis, in a manner which has earlier been conceived only for coarse- and medium-resolution instruments.