Abstract
The NASA/JPL Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar system (AIRSAR) has been in operation since 1988. The original radar configuration consisted of PIL/C-band quadpolarization mode in both 20 MHz and 40 MHz chirp bandwidths. Over the years, we have added the L- and C-band along track interferometry mode (ATI), the on-board processor, the C-band cross-track interferometry mode (XTI) in 199 1 , and the L-band XTI mode in 1995. In addition, we also replaced the GPS receiver as well as the inertial navigation system in 1995 to improve the accuracy of motion compensation and geolocation of the output products. In the 1996 PacRim Campaign, we flew a new digital chirp generator that has significantly better chirp linearity, which should improve the ISLR of the output images. In this paper, we will briefly describe the instrument characteristics, the evolution of the various radar modes, the instrument performance and improvement in the knowledge of the positioning and attitude information of the radar. In addition, we will summarize the progress of the data processing effort especially in the interferometry processing. Finally, we will address the issue of processing and calibrating the cross-track interferometry (XTI) data.
