TR Air Forces|News & Discussion

[Yasar_TR]

Agree on much of what you said. But if I may nitpick:
- The 40m resolution you mention for Sentinel-1 is not quite correct. Sentinel-1 actually provides data in different modes with different resolutions (ground ranges ranging from 5m to 20m) and the one you would use for this task is the Stripmap mode with Single Look Complex processing, which gives you a 4m x 4m resolution (range x azimuth).
- The detection of ships with AIS is like an add-on feature and it's not relevant here. But, ships with their transponders off can still be detected with SAR. I had once written a deep learning algorithm to do just that using Sentinel-1.
- This is actually a moot point since I just used Sentinel-1 as an example of a very popular SAR satellite that can see through clouds without a huge antenna. For the detection of stealth jets it is obviously not viable due to long revisit times. That's why I said a special constellation of satellites. Also probably not with C-SAR but with L-SAR as RCS of stealth fighters tend to be optimized for C band anyway.
- Agree on the computation challenge, but things tend to improve fast in that domain.

But yes, one day.

Sentinel-1 spatial resolution

Hi，everyone.What is the difference between Resolutionand Pixel spacing? Thank you！

forum.step.esa.int

Well, this site gives values similar to what I had read and shared in my previous post.
But it is all retrospective. More area sweep at a time, less resolution
Narrower swath distances, better resolution. More visits better resolution.
Just like ICEYE constellations. The minute you narrow swath to 5km your resolution increases to 0.25metres. Increase swath to 100km, you get 15m resolution.
A big problem with these is getting real time data, and response times.
When these issues are resolved, then we may start seeing the light.

But the rate we are going at the moment is rather alarming. Every country trying to put satellites up there is cluttering the space near our planet. Already space debris is a problem. It is disturbing that we may get stuck at one point because of the junk that has gathered up there. These satellites have finite lives, 10-15 years being common. Once they run out of steam, they start gradually losing orbit altitude until they burn in atmosphere. But that too is a long time and it is uncontrolled.