Garada

Garada is a proposed Australian led Formation Flying L-Band SAR satellite system that provides SAR imagery and interpreted data to primarily Australian end users for the purposes of soil moisture mapping, forest change detection, flood and disaster monitoring and bistatic research. It is aimed primarily at civilian applications but may also support... defence. The system comprises two identical satellites flying half an orbit apart in a sun synchronous orbit of 630km altitude. The orbit repeat cycle of 6 days results in the whole of Australia being overflown every three days. The main payload is a high resolution L band Synthetic Aperture Radar that has a resolution of 4-11m in range and 7m in azimuth. A secondary payload is a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver designed to receive positioning and timing signals from multiple satellite navigation systems. The satellite is intended to be launched from the, Falcon 9 class launch vehicle. The design is based on Astrium's Snapdragon configuration and TerraSAR-L experience. The primary ground station for receiving the satellite data is located in Antarctica to provide good orbit coverage. The return of the received data to Australia uses the proposed Antarctic broadband link satellite data system. A secondary ground station in Tasmania provides additional orbit coverage and redundancy. The mission and payload operations and payload data processing are carried out in an operations centre located in Australia and staffed by Australian personnel. The research within Garada is made up of 11 distinct work packages each led by an internationally recognised investigator. Individual work packages have the potential to generate new knowledge as "stand-alone" investigations, as well as feeding into the project's defined overall aims; meaning benefits will resonate beyond Garada.Read More