Radar/SAR Sensors

Development of Radar/SAR sensors and supporting systems

This project task is in charge of the different technical and hardware developments.

An initial C-Band full-pol GBSAR sensor has already been developed for soil moisture and vegetation parameters retrieval. 

Despite this main sensor of the proposed radar campaign is fully operative, some extra effort has been needed to improve the radar radiometric stability and polarimetric performance in the wide field of view of the sensor. 

A second X-band channel has been developed in order to  achieve multichannel operation, and a multispectral camera will be included in the sensor.

In support of Geostationary radar based missions under study such as Hydroterra, Argos (ESA) and a future Snow GEO-LEO mission by JPL-NASA (where our team has been invited to participate), the ongoing research on interferometric orbit determination will be continued with expanded base lines to improve precision. Telecommunication geostationary (Ku-Band) and geosynchronous communications satellites (P-Band) will be used for orbit validation and to test new concepts of ground based bistatic SAR using the satellites as transmitters of opportunity.

Based on the radar waveform generation technology developed for agricultural monitoring, VitalSense project is the result of a promising set of on-going experiments based on 120 GHz radar, an Industrial Scientific Medical band appropriate for both healthcare and automotive applications. 

Encouraging preliminary experiments have been carried out in collaboration with the Pediatric Reference Hospital Sant Joan de Deu (SJD) in Barcelona, showing the capability of the radar as a non-intrusive instrument for detecting vital signs, as breath rate, cardiac rhythm and eyelid flicker.

UPC is responsible for the coordination of this project task.

Main objectives

• High quality polarimetric measurements of the single (C-Band) GBSAR instrument

• Secondary X-band sensor for multichannel measurement capability

• Integration of multispectral image to the soil moisture and vegetation characterization radar sensor

• Precise orbit determination with extended base-lines 

• Simulation of GeoSAR missions with multiple platforms (Argos ESA, SNOW Prop JPL)

• Permanent GBSAR monitoring based on Geostationary transmitters of opportunity (GeoGBSAR)

• 120 GHz radar sensor for in-vehicle automotive and vital signs detection applications