New mission concepts based on on-board SAR processing

The concept of using on-board SAR processing to allow the direct dissemination of medium rate images to small user stations is under analysis in an ESA study. The preliminary results are presented here. The specific requirements coming from applications that could take advantage of this concept have been analysed against the performance that could be achieved by a medium-size mission of this type. The application of ice monitoring for ships navigation purposes has been identified as a very interesting candidate. Also other applications have shown good potentialities as target customers, as confirmed by a workshop held last year in ESA with various user communities. The outline of a conceptual mission named NICE (Navigation through ICE) is presented. The on-board processing algorithm and some of the results achieved during the tests are presented.