History and Background
Over the last two decades several operational civilian free flying spaceborne SAR missions have been launched by Argentina, Canada, China, ESA, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia, as well as commercial companies, which are widely used for a large spectrum of applications. They cover spectral ranges in the L-, C-, and X-Bands. In the next decade, more than a dozen missions are expected to operate simultaneously, with each mainly driven by the needs of its agency. As each agency designs their mission for specific objectives on unique timelines, the coordination of observation plans for SAR missions is complex.
Many of these data sets are available to the science applications community either shortly after acquisition or retrospectively. At the same time, computational technologies are undergoing a revolution in speed, interconnectivity, software maturity and openness, and interoperability. Therefore, coordination across the international community of SAR data providers with respect to efficient data acquisition, planning, science algorithm development, data product standards, framework for science data processing methodologies, data requests and processing resources should, in principle, be possible and would be highly advantageous to all parties. In recent years, a number of commercial initiatives have been started aiming to also provide services based on SAR images with high geometric and temporal resolution through constellations of small SAR satellites.
The International Coordination Group for Spaceborne SAR (ICGS-SAR) was formed in response to these needs, with workshops held in 2018, hosted by NASA / JPL, and 2022, hosted by ESA. A third workshop is planned for September 2024, hosted by JAXA.
Agencies
The International Coordination Group for Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Missions consists of representatives from ASI, CONAE, CSA, DLR, ESA, ISRO, JAXA, and NASA.