You must be having very low standards to consider S-Band radar something impressive...
The German civilian TerraSar-X and the military SAR-Lupe use X-band for their radar images. That is a 2-4 times shorter wavelength as S-Band and thus producing a much more detailed image with the same antenna size.
Just to put in my :2cents:, Russia is going to launch Condor-E radar satellite anytime in 2012, that has an S-band radar too:
They are saying in the poster:
Orbit altitude is 500 km;
S-band radar resolution:
- 1-2 m in "searhclight" burst mode;
- 1-3 m in continuous mode;
- 5-30 m in survey mode.
On the other hand, Arkon-2 sat (currently planned for 2017) is promised to be like the following:
X-band synthetic radar's performances:
[TABLE="head"]Imaging mode|Frame's projection dimensions (km)|Swath width (km)|Worst spatial resolution, no worse than (m)|Radimetric resolution, no more than (dB)|Radiometric sensitivity, no more than (dB)
Object high detail|10 x 10|450|1|3.0|- 22-18
Object normal detail|50 x 50|450|5-6|1.5-2.5|- 35-20
Narrow swath along a route|30 x 4000|450|3-6|1.5-2.0|- 26-20
Normal swath along a route|130 x 4000|450|50|1.0|- 30
Wide swath along a route|450 x 4000|450|200|1.0|- 30
[/TABLE]
Also it should image objects in two polarities at once, be able to see relative objects' altitude with resolution no worse than 1-2 m and be able to snap objects to coordinates with error no more than 30-90 m in autonomous mode.
References:
