M.G.KRASNOGORSKY, P.A.SHIROKOV NPO Mashinostroyenia

High resolution sensors mounted on spacecraft enable the regular all-weather round the clock sensing of territories located in the North and the Article Seas shelf for geological monitoring of objects extracting, processing and transporting hydrocarbon raw materials, as well as for ice monitoring, making precise maps of these territories etc.

Experiments and research carried out during the flight of Almaz-1 spacecraft developed by NPO Mashinostroyenia along with results of using the data obtained from other radar space systems for the Earth remote sensing have confirmed possibility and high efficiency of radar data application in this field.

The example is the research on application of radar images from Almaz-1 station for geological and geomorphological study of Kara strait or results of the experiment on monitoring of oil leakage in the Norwegian Sea.

The methods of interferometric survey and data processing may be efficiently used for making high accuracy digital elevation models.

Methods of differential interferometry enable monitoring of relief changes in terms of height and velocity with the accuracy comparable with a radar wave length based upon surveys of slumps (heavings)of soil carried out at different time in the potentially dangerous regions (construction in the permafrost regions, underground pipelines, oil and gas extracting, transporting and storing regions etc.).

New prospects in the radar image application for the Arctic shelf monitoring will be opened in connection with NPO Mashinostroyenia development of Kondor-E space radar system for the Earth remote sensing. This system will allow surveying objects in several modes with different values of resolution from 1 m to 20-30 m and swath width from 10 km to 150-200 km respectively. The average periodicity of survey for the latitude of 70 ° will be 9.5 hours iii case of one SC. It is supposed that Kondor-E space system will all the time have 2 or 3 spacecraft in the orbit, and due to this periodicity of survey will considerably increase.

The range of information products obtained from Kondor-E data can include topographic maps of big scale, continuously updated maps of ice situation, maps of pollution in oil product extracting and transporting regions, high accuracy 3-D images of terrain based upon stereoscopic and interferometric data processing as well as other information products. Methods and special software for task-oriented processing of radar data should be elaborated at the stage of this space system flight trials.

ARCTIC SHELF OIL AND GAS CONFERENCE 2004