SSX-1 Airborne SAR Payload

SSX-1 is SARsatX’s fully-polarimetric, X-band airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) payload, developed as a flight-test platform to validate real-world Earth observation use cases and to refine the design of the company’s future orbital SAR satellites before they are committed to a spacecraft bus. Flown on light aircraft, SSX-1 lets SARsatX collect high-quality, controlled SAR imagery over target scenes to develop and tune image-formation algorithms, calibrate sensor performance, and demonstrate mission concepts to prospective government and commercial customers ahead of the operational EarthLife satellite constellation reaching orbit.

The payload delivers a slant-range resolution of 1.5 m enabled by 100 MHz of transmit bandwidth, and operates in a fully-polarimetric mode, allowing simultaneous acquisition of multiple polarization channels for advanced target-scattering-mechanism analysis such as material discrimination, surface roughness characterization and change detection. Operating in X-band, SSX-1 produces imagery with a visual character that closely resembles optical photography, which simplifies interpretation for analysts who are more familiar with electro-optical imagery than traditional radar products.

Despite its high performance, SSX-1 is designed to be power-efficient: at a peak transmit power of only 20 W, the system does not require a complex or high-capacity power supply from the host aircraft, making it straightforward to integrate on a range of light aircraft platforms for rapid, flexible, targeted Earth observation campaigns. Data collected with SSX-1 directly feeds SARsatX’s SAR processing pipeline and the EarthLife analytics platform, helping the company bridge the gap between raw radar signal collection and actionable, insight-ready geospatial products for sectors including energy, defense, maritime, agriculture, disaster response and infrastructure monitoring.