Capella's SAR satellites support a wide range of look angles and can collect data in:
- Spotlight (Spot)
- Sliding Spotlight (Site)
- Stripmap (Strip) imaging modes.
Imaging Modes
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Spotlight (Spot) The antenna beam is focused on a point on the Earth for an extended period. Azimuth resolution increases with the dwell time of the antenna beam on the target, and range resolution increases with the bandwidth. Dwell time on a single spot is set to provide a desired azimuth resolution. The image width is determined by the antenna beam size. These longer dwell time acquisitions processed with multiple looks provide better image quality with less speckle |
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Sliding Spotlight (Site) This mode increases the image length of high-resolution spotlight acquisitions. Instead of illuminating a fixed point on the ground, the acquisition angle is slowly varied to slide the illumination point along the ground. Sliding spotlight provides excellent image resolution with larger area coverage than spotlight. |
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Stripmap (Strip) The center of the antenna beam moves in tandem with the satellite. The ground swath is illuminated with continuous sequence of pulses while the antenna beam is fixed in look angle. This results in a SAR image longer than both spotlight and sliding spotlight with a continuous image quality and resolution. |
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