ONERA SAR facilities

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the airborne SAR systems developed by the French Aerospace Lab ONERA over the past five years. The first system, called SETHI, is presented in the first section. It has been developed according to the standard FAR25 applied to civil application. The main improvement compared to the previous ONERA airborne radar system RAMSES is that the antennas are located into two pods compatible with small aircrafts like the Falcon 20. This pod-based configuration allows the easy integration of any kind of payloads under the single certification of the pods by authorities. The second section describes the BUSARD concept, dedicated to UAV-like payloads. A special attention is set on its Ka-band radar payload. Finally, we describe the RAMSES NG project, with a new installation on board a Falcon 20 aircraft and we expose the latest X-band developments. The three systems are summarized on overview tables.