PacRIM II: a review of AirSAR operations and system performance

NASA's AirSAR instrument has long been a heavily utilized resource in the international remote sensing community, including, most recently, the very successful PACRIM II mission. In this paper we briefly review the AirSAR sytstem, its expected performance, and quality of data obtained during that mission. We discuss the system hardware calibration methodologies, and present quantitative performance values of radar backscatter and interferometric height errors (random and systematic) from PACRIM II calibration data. We also summarize the various anomalies experienced during the PACRIM II mission, their potential impacts on data quality, and possible solutions to those problems. Finally, in light of these assessments, we discuss near term system enhancements, and expected performance improvements for future AirSAR missions. In particular, we present a redesigned data acquisition system that promises to improve data reliability and system flexibility while increasing data-throughput. One distinct advantage of this system is it will allow us to collect wide-swath high-bandwidth data thereby making data collection more efficient when high bandwidth area imagery is required