While creating a tasking order, you’ll need to specify order parameters for the tasking acquisition. As SAR imagery is captured with active sensors, SAR order parameters will vary from the typical optical order parameters.
The operation mode that determines how the system radar beam is emitted and received. It doesn’t directly impact SAR imagery quality, but comes with a trade-off between effective azimuth resolution and scene sizes.
You can choose one of the spot modes for better resolution, or one of the scan modes offer the better coverage.
This is the scene size of the acquired SAR imagery. You can specify resolution for some collections that accept POI geometries, but for most collections it’s set by the chosen acquisition mode.
The priority of the order. Weather and clouds don’t affect SAR acquisitions, but competition for tasking slots can still apply.
Incidence angle is the angle between the sensor’s line of sight and the surface normal at the target. Unlike optical imagery, larger incidence angles can improve the effective ground range resolution of acquired SAR imagery.
You can define the maximum incidence angle when creating a tasking order.
This is azimuth resolution, the image resolution in the radar platform’s travel direction. This is distinct from ground range and slant range resolution, which is measured along other planes.
You can specify resolution for some collections, but for most collections it’s set by the chosen acquisition mode.
Polarization is the orientation of the waves that the system can transmit and receive. Polarization is expressed as vertical (V) or horizontal (H) with respect to the Earth’s orientation. The first letter corresponds to how signals are emitted, and the second letter corresponds to how they are received.
Single polarization, where signals are transmitted and received in the same orientation, is suited for surfaces. Cross polarization, where signals are transmitted and received in different orientations, is suited for volumetric targets. Dual polarization uses a mix of orientations for transmitting and receiving, and is suited for a variety of cases.
This parameter adjusts the multi-looking applied to the SAR imagery.
Multi-looking is a SAR processing technique. The received radar signals are split into multiple “looks” or sub-images. The looks are then recombined to average out signal variance and minimize noise at the expense of effective azimuth and range resolution.
Single-looked imagery will have the best resolution but with more noise. Multi-looked imagery will be less noisy but with a diminished resolution. You can specify number of looks for some collections, but for most collections it’s set by the chosen acquisition mode.