Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program: Airbus U.S. Synthetic Aperture Radar Quality Assessment Summary

Quality assessment of the Airbus X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite products was conducted by the Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) program’s radar subject matter experts, following the Joint NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) assessment draft guidelines. All three Airbus SAR spacecraft (TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, and PAZ) are based on the TerraSAR-X platform, and each have an active phased array antenna that is 4.8 x 0.7 m in the along-track and cross-track dimensions, respectively. TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X are in a helical orbit, creating a bistatic imaging geometry, in addition to being capable of independent monostatic observations. The PAZ mission follows TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X in the same 11-day orbit with a 5.5-day lag. TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X are designed, developed, and operated through a Public-Private Partnership, while PAZ is a dual-use mission (civil and defense agencies), funded and owned by the Spanish Ministry of Defense and managed by Hisdesat (Hisdesat Servicios Estratégicos, S.A.), a Spanish private communications company.

The assessment presented in this document is divided into two main parts: documentation review and the assessment of test datasets. The documentation review in sections 2.1 through 2.4 includes the assessment of the Airbus documentation provided to the CSDA evaluation team. The grading of these documents is given in columns 1-4 of the maturity matrix shown in section 1.1. Section 2.5 summarizes the evaluation performed by NASA using the data purchased through the CSDA program. The grading for this is given in the last column of the maturity matrix. Section 3 provides more detailed explanations on the methods and the results of the data analysis performed by NASA.

Only the documents provided by Airbus for the evaluation were considered for the review. Additional documentation with more detailed description of the calibration and validation procedures may be available online but were not considered for this evaluation. The product information provided in the available documentation (RD-1, RD-2) and the product metadata together provided adequate information to work with the data. The product details in the metadata included the required information to work with the data in the common XML file format. Metrological traceability documentation was not provided to CSDA. All relevant characterization of the SAR system and data were provided, and the metadata include all relevant ancillary information. Documentation provided to CSDA included limited pre-flight and post-launch calibration information.