Instead of one long antenna that sends one big pulse at one time and then collects the pulses that come back, SAR have a much smaller antenna that sends lots of pulses in quick succession over time as the satellite goes through space.It “listens” to the pulses that come back to it when it moves through its orbit.That’s why the name synthetic is applied to the radar.
What is a voxel?. It’s a 3D volumetric pixel, a cube. But voxels are nothing new. They’ve been used extensively in two key areas within computing. Computer games render worlds and use voxels instead of polygons. Minecraft is a good example — it’s a voxel rendered world. Gaming companies love voxels for their multi-resolution capability over polygons. Robotics uses voxels for image processing to reduce the size of LIDAR point clouds and to create small dynamic maps — or what we call VOG (Voxel Occupancy Grid) — for robots.