RADARSAT-1 background mission monitoring of the Arctic

RADARSAT-1 baseline data acquisition planning has been performed for the past nine years under the Canadian Space Agency's Background Mission. Background Mission is about building uniform, global archives in support of RADARSAT-1 Program objectives of time- and site-specific data collections. Most of these objectives were met in the first five years of the nominal mission duration. An extended phase of Background Mission is under way, the most important element of which is a continuous four-season coverage of the Arctic Basin. This paper reports on the progress of this coverage campaign, which started in mid-2003, and has since been implemented uninterruptedly for summer, fall, winter and spring snapshots of the northern polar cap and a large area around it. It is expected that the systematic, sustained RADARSAT Background Mission coverage of the Arctic would result into valuable temporal records of a part of the world that is particularly sensitive to global climate change.