TerraSAR-X Capabilities in Polar Regions

DLR participates in a coordinated plan established by the space agencies for the optimum use of SAR acquisitions over the Artic and Antarctica for the remaining period of IPY and beyond. Due to the specific advantages of the X-band in respect to snow and ice properties and the high spatial resolution of the data, the contribution of TerraSAR-X focuses on topics like mapping of seasonal snow cover at high latitudes, ice sheet velocity, velocity fields of slow and fast moving glaciers, permafrost, generation of DEMs, sea ice classification. These are reflected in a coordinated proposal which is prepared by DLR and the scientific community as part of the common polar SAR acquisition plan

Three years of operations of the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-3-OLCI PAC at German Aerospace Center

Copernicus is the European Earth Observation Programme, conducted jointly by the EC, ESA, EUMETSAT and the member states. The Sentinel satellites constitute the Copernicus space segment. Since 2014 already six Sentinel satellites have been launched successfully. The core payload data ground segment (PDGS) for the Sentinel satellites is managed by ESA and operated by national partners. In this core PDGS, DLR has been selected to install and operate Processing and Archiving Centers (PACs) for Sentinel-1 and the data from the Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) aboard Sentinel-3. This paper describes the results of the first three years of operations of the S1- and S3-OLCI-PAC at DLR. Daily, around 950 products are being processed based on sensor data from the OLCI instrument on Sentinel-3A, over 330 GB of associated data are stored in the Long-Term Archive of the DLR-PAC. The Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B satellites are already supplying many times that amount. Over 10,000 GB (10 TB) and more than 4700 products from the satellite pair are handled every day. In the first three years of operations the DLR-PAC has already processed and archived over 3.8 million data sets. They represent a data volume exceeding 6500 terabytes (6.3 petabytes)

Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-3-OLCI PAC at DLR

GMES / Copernicus is the European Earth Observation Programme, conducted jointly by the EC, ESA, EUMETSAT and the member states. The Sentinel satellites (Copernicus space segment) are expected to be launched in 2014 (Sentinel-1A, -2A, and -3A). The core payload data ground segment (PDGS) is managed by ESA and operated by national partners. In this core ground segment, the DLR German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) was selected to install and operate Processing and Archiving Centers (PACs) for Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-3-OLCI. This paper describes the current status of the project “Preparation and Operations of the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-3 OLCI Off-line Processing and Archiving Centre at DLR Oberpfaffenhofen (S1-PAC / S3-OLCI-PAC)”

Linking Earth Observation Systems and Applications:Systems and Projects of the German Remote Sensing Data CenterEnvironment and Security

Overview of German Remote Sensing Data Center Earth Observation Ground Segment activities. Overview on GMES and near real time application

The TanDEM-X Mission Design and Data Acquisition Plan

The TanDEM-X mission comprises two fully active synthetic aperture radar Xband satellites, operating three years as a joint mission. The primary goal of this mission is the derivation of a high-precision global DEM according to HRTI level 3 quality. Also secondary mission goals shall be performed like e.g. digital beam-forming, along-track interferometry or bi-static experiments. The orbit control is based on the HELIX principle, an e/i-vector separation of the two satellites, enabling a safe and collision free operation of the spacecrafts. This formation is highly reconfigurable and allows many kinds of applications. To achieve the primary goal, a data acquisition strategy is derived, which proves the feasibility of a single global mapping of the Earth in approximately 1½ years. This strategy works as a reference scenario, which specifies for each orbit different possible data acquisitions at various latitudes with several incident angles. This is necessary to avoid data acquisition conflicts with the original TerraSAR-X mission. It is envisaged that each satellite covers 50 percent of the already planned TerraSAR-X mission, leaving enough monitoring time for the joint mission. For deriving such a highly accurate DEM, it is prerequisite that the baselines and their corresponding height of ambiguities correspond to the requirements of the HRTI-3 standard. Therefore, as the baselines vary with latitude and incident angle, the formation shall be adjusted such that each scene is monitored with an optimum baseline. Due to topographic influences, one data acquisition might not suffice for terrain with steep gradients; for such regions, additional monitoring time is allocated in a second mission phase. For these additional data acquisitions, the formation is reconfigured. This second phase will last approximately one year, leaving enough time in this three year mission scenario for a third phase to allow for secondary mission goals like e.g. along-track interferometry, bi-static mapping or digital beamforming. For this whole scenario, the total fuel consumption is estimated taking into account relative orbit control, manoeuvre budget for formation control, and formation reconfiguration. Finally, a brief data reception concept is presented which allows for sufficient downlink capacity with a network of ground stations. Furthermore, a data processing system is presented which is compatible with already existing structures developed for the TerraSARX mission. A modular processing chain is introduced, which allows the handling of a large amount of data (based on developments from SRTM and TerraSAR-X), bi-static imaging, multi-baseline interferometry, global calibration, precision mosaicking, and data archiving

Re-Processing of ERS-1/-2 SAR data for derivation of glaciological parameters on the Antarctic Peninsula

Climate Change, it‘s polar amplification and impacts are subject of current research in various thematic and methodological fields. In this context different spaceborne remote sensing techniques play an important role for data acquisition and measurement of different geophysical variables. A recently founded Junior Researchers Group at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is studying chang- ing processes in cryosphere and atmosphere above the Antarctic Peninsula. It is the aim of the group to make use of long-term remote sensing data sets of the land and ice surface and the atmosphere in order to characterize changes in this sensitive region. One aspect focuses on the application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for glaciological investigations on the Antarctic Peninsula. The data had been acquired by the European Remote Sensing (ERS-1 and ERS-2) satellites and received at DLR’s Antarctic station GARS O’Higgins. Even though recent glaciological investigations often make use of modern polar-orbiting single-pass SAR-systems like e.g. TanDEM-X, only ERS-1 (1991 – 2000) and its follow-up mission ERS-2 (1995 – 2011) provided a 20 years’ time series of continuous measurements, which offers great potential for long-term studies. Interferometric synthetic radar (InSAR) and differential interferometric synthetic radar (DInSAR) methods as well as the intensity tracking technique are applied to create value-added glaciological SAR-products, such as glacier velocity maps, coherence maps, interferograms and differential interferograms with the aim to make them accessible to interested scientific end-users. These products are suitable for glaciological applications, e.g. determinations of glacier extend, and grounding line position, glacier and ice-stream velocities and glacier mass balance calculations with the flux-gate approach. We represent results of case studies from three test sites located at different latitudes and presenting differ- ent climatic and glaciological conditions in order to do first parameter adjustments for the processing. The subsequent aim of the entire project is to re-process the entire 20 years ERS SAR archive for the Antarctic Peninsula

GMES Sentinel-1 Soil Moisture Algorithm Development (S1-SMAD) - Consulting for the Soil Moisture Processing Infrastructure

This document includes the main contributions of project partner DLR within the GMES Sentinel-1 Soil Moisture Algorithm Development (S1-SMAD) project (ESA contract number 4000101350/10/NL/MP/ef)