Digital Beam Forming for Ka-band InSAR instruments

Ka-Band interferometry offers new opportunities in Earth observation for science and civil security applications due to the unique characteristics of this higher frequency band. Several Ka-Band satellite missions and instruments are currently under development. The first Ka-band instrument, Altika Altimeter [1], is in orbit and has shown remarkable performance confirming the feasibility to use this frequency for EO application despite higher atmospheric losses. However for Ka-band interferometric SAR operating from a single platform the link budget is critical and requires signal recovery techniques. Scan-on-receive combined with digital beam forming overcomes these restrictions and offers additional features leading to high performance systems. This paper discusses possibilities to apply digital beam forming techniques to Ka-band instruments enhancing the performance.