Astrium, Europe’s leading space company, and OHB System AG (Bremen, Germany) signed a contract in Friedrichshafen for the development, const...
The contract governing the operation of existing German SAR-Lupe satellite-based radar reconnaissance system expires in November 2017. In order to maintain its reconnaissance capabilities in the future,, SARah is the follow-up system, which will be more effective.
The contract also covers the provision of all necessary components for the ground segment to ensure the image production process, from requesting images through to final delivery is fully operational from the end of 2019.
The overall SARah system consists of three satellites and two ground stations. The space segment consists of two satellites equipped with the reflector technology from OHB, and a third satellite, equipped with Astrium’s proven phased-array technology, currently operating perfectly in orbit on the civil satellites TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X.
The term ‘phased-array’ is used to describe phase-controlled antennas made up of numerous individual transmitter/receiver modules which can be interconnected, bundled and variably controlled. This enables direction and range of view to be adjusted without needing to move the antennas mechanically, thus providing the user with rapid image sequencing, variable image sizes and ‘blur-free’ recordings.
