The birth of a revolutionising technology is something that will benefit generations to come. SARs that we have today are great, but have their limitations. What if we could add the good from both and create something revolutionary? This is exactly what our director and co-founder Tapan Misra did. Here’s what he had to say:
Today I received my patent, based on my work carried out in the last year of my service. Probably one of the significant contributions to SAR system configuration. A strip map SAR with the resolution performance of a spotlight SAR. But unlike in spotlight SAR, the imaging will be a continuous one. In spotlight SAR, as the name suggests, the imaging is limited to a small spot of terrain.
Typically a spotlight SAR gives imaging on a 5kmx5km spot with better than 1 m resolution. In RISAT-1, the spot size was increased with the innovation of sliding spotlight in C band, to 10km(across flight direction)x100km(along flight direction) and the resolution was 0.6 m. Now with this patented technology, the swath can be as high as 30 km with a resolution of 0.6 m but imaging extent along flight direction will remain theoretically unlimited.
I take this opportunity to acknowledge my erstwhile colleague Shri Susmit Bhattacharya, who offered himself for writing the initial simulation software for this concept and formulation developed by me. Unfortunately, he was in a hurry to leave ISRO to join Qualcomm and he missed the experience of filing the patent, rewriting it many a time to address various queries and checking the same conclusion in many different ways and simulations.
