Advances and prospects in SAR missions and instruments

Current and future interferometric SAR satellite missions are faced with different strong requirements: precise orbit measurement, a large amount of data to be acquired and operationally processed and a high accuracy of the final products. The article gives an exemplary overview about experiences with the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) as one of the most advanced SAR missions. We focus on calibration and interferometric processing and address different aspects such as error influences, algorithms and computational environment.