The ONERA RAMSES SAR: Latest Significant Results and Future Developments

Abstract

The last SAR campaigns of the French ONERA RAMSES system have been dedicated to various applications, military or civilian, including very-high resolution, FOPEN (Foliage penetration) in cooperation with the FOI, MTI, bistatic SAR and vegetation characterization. These different projects gave us the opportunity to improve our SAR processing procedure (very high resolution) and to develop new algorithms (bistatic scenario). In parallel, the ONERA team has developed and applied many techniques (polarimetric analysis, PolInSAR, wavelet analysis) which proved to be efficient in these different thematic context. The current aircraft platform, a Transall C160 will be decommissioned at the end of 2008. In order to maintain our activities, we are developing a new system family compatible with smaller aircrafts. The challenge is two fold : migrating the existing radars in a airplane four times smaller and maintaining our innovation capabilities with the development of new radar concepts. These paper presents the most recent results on SAR techniques and describes the status of the development of the RAMSES successors : the first, SETHI, dedicated to military applications and earth observation, the second, BUSARD more focused on UAV applications.