Radarsat 1

 1995-059A

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The CSA's Radarsat was built by Spar Aerospace. The 4.2m long, 2.8m wide spacecraft bus, built by Ball and based on the RME satellite, carried a large solar array and a 15 x 1.5m C-band synthetic aperture radar. It had a mass of 2750 kg. The radar has a 500 km swath width and can be steered electronically, with a fine (8-m resolution) 50 x 50 km area mode and a scan (100 m resolution) 500 x 500 km mode. It is intended to image the Arctic region and Canada, and will also improve maps of the Antarctic. 15 percent of the observing time is allocated to the US in return for the launch. Radarsat is to be operated by the Canadian Space Agency from the Radarsat Control Center at St Hubert, Quebec. Radarsat was launched into a 6am/6pm sun-synchronous orbit for continuous solar array illumination.

In Sep 1997 the satellite was flipped in orientation (yaw) to begin the Antarctic-1 mapping mission, imaging to the left of the satellite track.

The MDA company operates Radarsat. The Dept. Foreign Affairs and the military DND does tasking for surveillance to MDA; commercial tasking is done directly by MDA, while civil tasking is sent to MDA by CSA.

Payload:

• C-band 1.5 x 15m SAR radar, 5.3 GHz

Radarsat
Date	Time	Event	Orbit
1995 Nov 4	1422	Launch by Delta 7920-10	V SLC2W
		SRM 1-9 sep
	1426	Stage 1 sep
	1426	Delta stage 2 burn
	1427	Type 10 fairing sep
	1432?	Delta stage 2 cutoff	190? x 784 x 98.6
	1523?	Delta stage 2 MES2
		Delta stage 2 MECO2
	1526	Delta stage 2 sep
	1552	Solar array deploy
	1615	SAR begin deploy
1995 Nov 4			100.57 783 x 787 x 98.6
1995 Nov 4	1540?	Delta SES-3
		SECO-3	786 x 1462 x 98.6
1995 Nov 4	1608?	Delta SES-4
		Delta/SURFSAT SECO-4	934 x 1494 x 100.64
1995 Nov 7			100.57 783 x 787x 98.6
1995 Nov 15		Begin orbit adjust
1995 Dec 16		In operational orbit
1995 Dec 16			100.70 791 x 792 x 98.6
1997 Sep 9		Reorient satellite
1997 Sep 11		Begin Antarctic-1 mission (AMM)
2002 Nov		safemode, AOCS problem
2002 Dec 24		Resume ops
2011 Mar 31			100.70 791 x 792 x 98.6