ESA OSCAR airborne system in final testing stages.

The squinted ATI principles of SEASTAR were successfully demonstrated experimentally and scientifically with data from the Wavemill airborne demonstrator proof-of-concept campaign over the Irish Sea (Martin et al., 2016; Martin & Gommenginger, 2017; Martin et al., 2018).

The Wavemill Level-0 data were processed to produce Level-1 interferograms (correcting large aircraft navigation/attitude variations) and Level 2 TSCV maps. At 1.5-km resolution, RMS errors against HF radar were better than 0.1ms−1 and 10°.

MetaSensing aircraft (LN-PNB Piper PA-31-310 Navajo) fitted with OSCAR and its radome (on the belly) during the function test flight off the Dutch coast on 11 April 2022.

A scientific campaign is planned for May 2022 over the Iroise Sea (France) to evaluate the capability of the instrument for TSCV and OCVW against independent ground truth measurements.

An airborne demonstrator of the three-look configuration used by SEASTAR was recently developed by MetaSensing under contract for ESA. The airborne system, known as OSCAR, was flown for functional test flight off the Dutch coast on 11 April 2022.