An Alaska SAR Facility overview in the Radarsat era

With the successful launch of Radarsat in November of 1995, the Alaska SAR Facility (ASF) at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) will soon be handling SAR data from four operational satellites (ERS-1, ERS-2, JERS-1, and Radarsat) at the same time. Coming upon the conclusion of 3 years of intensive planning, design, and implementation activities, ASF will be ready mid-1996 to fulfil its role in providing SAR data acquisition, processing, and archive services in support of the science community. ASF has been in operations since 1991; initially supporting ERS-1 users. It has grown from the simplicity of handling just one satellite, ERS-1, into a complex organization dealing with multi-national data providers and users. It has also gradually over the years expanded its services and is becoming more user driven in the form of its operations. This paper chronicles the progression and development of the ASF; with special attention given to its organization and structure in the current Radarsat era. Special treatment is given on describing in detail the end to end system data now and operations scenarios which serve to provide the science users insight into fully exploiting the ASF capabilities