NISAR was designed to deliver fast sampling, free and open access, and global coverage at full resolution and with polarimetric diversity. The technical innovation that allows this performance is the scan-on-receive SweepSAR design, conceived and refined collaboratively by NASA and the German Space Agency (DLR).
The L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (L-SAR) instrument is the focus of the NASA-chartered science goals for NISAR, and provides global coverage. The L-SAR is a side-looking, fully polarimetric, interferometric SAR at a wavelength of 24 cm, with a swath width of about 240 km, an along-track resolution of 7 m, and a cross-track resolution of 2 to 8 m (depending on mode).
The S-band SAR (S-SAR) instrument, developed in a collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), operates at a wavelength of 9.3 cm and is primarily used for acquisitions over India.
A more detailed description of the NISAR instrument design is in section 4.7 of the NISAR Mission Science Users’ Handbook.