Biomass, ESA's 7th Earth Explorer mission, will provide the first global scale, systematic measurements of the global distribution of biomass. This paper describes the Biomass instrument, an imaging synthetic aperture radar (SAR) at P-band. It provides an overview of the mission application and architecture, the instrument requiremnts and technical concept, and the predicted instrument performance.

The SCA instrument is a C-band wind scatterometer that forms part of the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG) mission. The paper presents an overview on the current development status of the SCA instrument and of its key equipment.

The SCA instrument is a C-band wind scatterometer that forms part of the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG) mission. The paper presents an overview on the SCA design and its mission performance as established during the SCA B2 Development Phase and as presented at the SCA PDR.

The paper describes the C-SAR instrument for the GMES Sentinel-1 mission. After a brief introduction of the Sentinel-1 instrument requirements a design description of the overall C-SAR instrument as well as of its major subsystems (i.e. the SAR Antenna Subsystem (SAS) and the SES Electronic Subsystem (SES)), is given. The paper concludes with an overview on the predicted instrument performance.

The CryoSat Earth Explorer Opportunity Mission will be the first mission to accurately determine the marine and land ice mass fluxes at a global scale. Its space segment is currently in its final test phase and will be shipped to its launch site Plesetzk in Russia by end of July. This paper gives a brief overview on the measured prelaunch performance of the CryoSat payload.

TanDEM-X is a mission proposal for a TerraSAR-X add-on satellite for high-resolution single-pass SAR interferometry. This mission proposal has been selected for a Phase A study within the scope of a Call for Proposals for a next German Earth Observation Mission to be launched in 2008/2009. The mission has the goal of generating a global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) with an accuracy corresponding to the DTED-3 specifications (12 m posting, 2 m relative height accuracy for flat terrain). This goal will be achieved by means of a second, TerraSAR-X like satellite (TanDEM-X) flying in a close orbit configuration with TerraSAR-X. This paper describes the mission concept and requirements, including several innovative aspects like operation modes, orbit selection and maintenance as well as PRF and phase synchronization. Results from a detailed performance estimation show the achievable DEM accuracy. Finally, an overview of the potential of the TanDEM-X mission for several scientific applications is presented.

The CryoSat Earth Explorer Opportunity Mission will allow an accurate determination of the marine and land ice mass fluxes at a global scale. This paper gives a brief overview on the CryoSat payload calibration. Special attention is given to the calibration of the interferometric baseline attitude, which is a novelty with respect to conventional radar altimeter calibration.

Information about radar targets has to go beyond the scalar radar cross section (RCS) for target classification purposes. The necessary target information is constrained in the complex RCS matrix. The authors show the theoretical derivation of this matrix and of the related scattering matrix. Both matrices contain the target's complex RCS for arbitrary polarization. The mathematical procedures for basis transformation that is, the evaluation of influences of polarization, are given. Equipment for wide-band, coherent RCS measurements with calibration targets and a 20-term error correction algorithm is presented. Using the complex RCS matrix, polarimetric target signatures are derived and plotted for simple objects. The target classification is finally based on the polarimetric signatures and the characteristic parameters derived from them. The basis of these are measurements of relevant samples and target RCS modeling.>