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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Daily Overview

Session

SAR Missions and PolInSAR Initiatives
Location: Red Hall
Session Chair: Irena Hajnsek, DLR/ETH Zürich
Session Chair: Francesco Sarti, European Space Agency (ESA)

Presentation 3

11:50am - 12:10pm

ALOS-4 PALSAR-3 – An L-band SAR Mission with Operational Polarimetric Capacity

Ake Rosenqvist^1,2, Takeo Tadono¹, Takeshi Motohka¹

1: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan; 2: solo Earth Observation (soloEO), Japan

The Advanced Land Observing Satellite-4 (ALOS-4) was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on July 1, 2024. ALOS-4 carries the Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar-3 (PALSAR-3) instrument, extending Japan’s more than 30-year heritage of L-band SAR missions that began with JERS-1 SAR, followed by ALOS PALSAR and ALOS-2 PALSAR-2.

Similar to ALOS-2, ALOS-4 operates in a 12 a.m./p.m. sun-synchronous orbit with a 14-day repeat cycle. A major advancement of PALSAR-3 over its predecessors is its enhanced wide-swath polarimetric capability, which enables quad-polarisation observations across a 100 km swath. This improvement allows for regional, gap-free coverage within only two observation cycles—compared to five cycles required by PALSAR-2.

Under the ALOS-4 Basic Observation Scenario, global quad-polarisation coverage is planned on an annual basis, with higher-frequency fully polarimetric acquisitions over selected regional and local target areas. The Earth Observation Research Center (EORC) of JAXA oversees research coordination, application development, and the generation of research datasets for both ALOS-2 and ALOS-4 missions. Amongst others, EORC coordinates the ALOS Kyoto & Carbon Initiative, which comprises a dedicated activity for polarimetric research using ALOS-2 and ALOS-4.

Through this presentation, we provide an overview of the ALOS-4 PALSAR-3 mission, with emphasis on its polarimetric capabilities, including the plans for polarimetric dataset generation and distribution by JAXA EORC.

We also touch upon the potential role of ALOS-4 in the era of other current and near-future L-band SAR missions, such as NISAR and ROSE-L, and how these missions can complement each other through cross-agency mission coordination.