Divided by continents, United by SAR
How a relation across seven seas gave birth to the best technology for SAR!
Arjun - Dronacharya
Chanakya - Chandragupta Maurya
Ramakant Achrekar - Sachin Tendulkar
What do these pairs have in common? Your first guess is right - the iconic student-teacher duos. But there is something else - all these pairs led to make history. And one such duo is what our Director and Co-founder Tapan Misra also shares with an icon in SAR - a student-teacher duo that revolutionised SAR as we know today! Here is what he writes:
Russel Keith Raney and I share an unequal friendship. He was in Master's, when I was born, on another distant continent, in another country, trying to rise like Sphinx from the injuries inflicted for centuries of domination by invaders and colonial masters.
What draws us together is a common trait - being maverick. In 1978, NASA launched the first SAR satellite in space, Seasat. NASA employed analogue data recording and optical processing, developed by JPL. NASA scientists believed that SAR processing was so complex that no computer, at that time frame, could process SAR data. Everybody in NASA gave a cold shoulder to this gentleman, who proposed that digital SAR processing is more elegant and doable by adding a few hardware tricks. He was disheartened and left for Canada, developed the first digital SAR processor and brought SAR processing to adolescence. Rest is history.
The celebrated Canadian SAR satellite Radarsat had imprints of his clever system design and leadership. He discovered the very elegant Chirp Scaling algorithm for SAR processing. Mini SAR from NASA onboard our own Chandrayan-1 was his brainchild. MiniSAR made history as it conclusively proved that water is present as dirty ice in the dark depths of polar craters, raising the hope of establishing the first human base, outside our blue planet.
I was drawn to him at the EuSAR Dresden conference in 2006 where he proposed a maverick idea of Hybrid polarimetry. Everybody listened to him with yawning and lack of interest. But I sensed a great idea and implemented hybrid polarimetry for the first time in RISAT-1. I was undaunted by severe opposition in ISRO trying to implement an idea that nobody had implemented! RISAT turned SAR polarimetry upside down and democratised polarimetry science. Today it is the global standard for all spaceborne SAR satellites conceived after RISAT-1.
I was pleasantly surprised when I received his heartfelt wishes for our new startup SISIR Radar. He even decided my designation which I am going to obey. The blessing from Guru to Shishya, which we are going to cherish forever.