In the last 5 years, the Institute has actively participated and also initiated several SAR missions and research programs that are decisive for its long-term strategy. Important examples are TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, F-SAR (new airborne SAR) and SAR-Lupe.
It is also working on future remote sensing and reconnaissance systems, such as Sentinel-1 (Copernicus program of EU/ESA), TerraSAR-NG (follow-on to TerraSAR-X), HRWS (next generation X-band SAR with high-resolution wide-swath imaging), Tandem-L (L-band mission proposal) BIOMASS (ESA Earth Explorer mission), VABENE (DLR project for traffic monitoring with radar) and the SAR-Lupe follow-on program. These projects are accompanied by research programs that ensure the Institute keeps a step ahead in the development of new research fields. Examples of such research programs are bistatic and multistatic SAR systems, digital beamforming, inverse SAR, polarimetric SAR interferometry and tomography, calibration, signatures, propagation, antennas, as well as radiometry and imaging techniques for security.