The Application of a Mixed General/Special Purpose Hardware in On-Board SATSAT Processing

In SATSAR huge amounts of data are involved corresponding to data rates of 100 to 1000 Mbits/s. The communication system and the intermediate storage on-board the satellite must handle this increasing amount of data as well. Furthermore, ground stations must process, broadcast and archive the SAR data and therefore they show the tendency to become more and more expensive and timeconsuming due to this data increment. An attractive solution to reduce the communication requirements is to perform SAR processing On-Board (O/B) the satellite [1]. It is the most rigorous kind of raw SAR data reduction if it is used in combination with standard image compression techniques. Data reduction also means that the required on-board storage capacity reduces, or vice versa, effectively more data can be stored on-board with the same storage capacity. Nowadays, one of the key limitation is the acquisition time of SAR satellites. The acquired data is stored intermediately on-board, and transmitted to Earth when the satellite is in sight of a ground station. The SAR is simply not operational when the storage devices are full, which means in practice that the data acquisition time nowadays is only in the order of 10 minutes. et