Preliminary Exploration of Systematic Geolocation Accuracy of GF-3 SAR Satellite System

Abstract

GF-3, the first full-polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite of China with a resolution up to 1 m, was successfully launched in August 2016 and, after 5 months of in-orbit calibration, it was officially delivered to the users in January 2017. In this paper, the geometric positioning error sources of the entire system are analyzed based on the real data acquisition, including atmospheric transmission, image processing, and geometric positioning. The positioning precision of the SAR system is validated by corner reflectors. The results show that the satellite positioning accuracy improved by 3 m.

Keywords

• GF-3 satellite
• Range-Doppler model
• Systematic geolocation
• Error source analysis