Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) and its follow-on L-band SAR mission

Abstract

Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) is a Japanese earth observation satellite launched in 2014 for disaster mitigation, environmental monitoring such as forest and sea/land ice, land monitoring such as agriculture and natural resources, and technology development. ALOS-2 observes the earth surface with the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar-2 (PALSAR-2) that has many improved performances compared to previous Japanese L-band SAR satellites. PALSAR-2 data has unique characteristics compared to other satellite sensors and are effectively used for many applications such as land deformation mapping and forest change mapping. To keep and enhance the applications using PALSAR-2 data, JAXA plans to launch a successor satellite to the ALOS-2 in JFY 2020. The concepts of the ALOS-2 follow-on are expanding swath width and increasing observation frequency while keeping high spatial resolution of the PALSAR-2 for improving the response of disaster monitoring, early detection of anomalies on the earth surface, and enabling time-series analysis. We present the status of ALOS-2 and its follow-on mission in Japan.