Patent — available for licensing
Digital Beamforming Interferometry
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a sophisticated form of radar that implements a single antenna to successfully scan a target area, store the received signals, and coherently process the signals to resolve elements in an image of the target area. Interferometric SAR (InSAR) uses two or more SAR images to generate three dimensional maps of surface deformation or digital elevation using phase difference information. InSAR is commonly implemented with SAR systems in a repeat pass platform configuration where two SAR images are generated during each of the passes, and an interferogram between the two images provides the desired "height" measurement, or in a single pass configuration where the SAR system uses two separate antennas are used to generate the interferogram. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a new approach that uses a single phased array antenna and a single pass configuration to generate interferograms.