RADARSAT-1 Background Mission global coverage

RADARSAT-1 Background Mission signifies baseline acquisitions of the satellite for building various site, time and application-specific data archives. The archives are to be considered benchmarks for global change studies and can be used in such applications as terrain mapping with radargrammetry and interferometry. These acquisitions were part of several coverage types that were undertaken over the past six years of the satellite operations. The variety of coverage is the result of the satellite's variable imaging modes, such as viewing angle, ground resolution, swath width, etc. Early ScanSAR beam coverage provided snapshots of large surfaces of the Earth. A RADARSAT beam-pair stereo coverage of the world's landmass is nearing completion. Remote oceanic islands were imaged successively to build multi-seasonal and multi-annual data sets for change detection. RADARSAT Fine beam resolution data were collected over most of the major cities of the world. Data acquisitions during the left-looking mode of operations of the satellite focused on the regions considered important in terms of geoscience applications. In the fall of 2000, the Canadian Space Agency improved RADARSAT-1 orbit maintenance for Fine beam interferometry over Antarctica. The opportunity was availed to collect similar data over Canada, Greenland, Iceland and some other ice capped regions of the world. These data acquisition campaigns are referred to in the following account on the status of RADARSAT-1 Background Mission.