Software for Generating 100-by-100-km Images From SAR Data

SAR Processing System Precision Processor (SPS PP) is one of the computer programs used in the Alaska SAR Facility (ASF) [where "SAR" means "synthetic-aperture radar"] to generate image data products. SPS PP ingests data that have been received from the RADARSAT (a Canadian Earth-observation satellite) and decoded into engineering and SAR signal data files, and processes these data into image data products that typically cover areas of about 100 km by 100 km. SPS PP can handle data from RADARSAT standard right- and left-looking beams, and is being enhanced to handle European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS) and Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (JERS) data. The output of SPS PP conforms to the standards of the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS). The left-looking products feature 16-bit detected pixels in slant-range format; the right-looking products can be in either ground-range detected or slant-range complex format. SPS PP resides on five IBM SP-2 computers with 8 processing nodes each. Each computer can produce a 100-by-100-km image frame in about 25 minutes.