SPACEBEAM aims at designing, realizing and testing an innovative radar receiver that will enable the concept of reconfigurable multi-beam Scan-on-Receive Synthetic Aperture Radar for Earth observation applications. 

In order to comply with the requirements of future swarms and constellations of low-Earth orbit satellites and cubesats in terms of performance, size, weight, power consumption and cost, the envisioned receiver will be based on an optical beamforming network realized as a photonic integrated circuit (PIC). 

The PIC will implement a precise, continuous beamforming of wideband signals, with the capability to flexibly change the set of antennas per beam, as well as the number of output beams. At the same time, the PIC will also realize a frequency-agnostic photonic down-conversion of signals, so that the output signals can be directly digitized. 

These innovative features make the SPACEBEAM PIC a powerful device for future Earth observation applications. The PIC will be implemented using two materials platforms, to achieve a compact “hybrid” chip-assembly including several active and passive functions (lasers, detectors, modulators, filters, switches, delays, phase shifters). 

The PIC will be controlled using a novel actuation technique based on low-power consuming piezo elements. In order to push forward the maturity of the SPACEBEAM technology, the project will also develop and test a Space-compliant package for the PIC. 

The packaged PIC will be included in a specifically designed Engineering Qualified Model of the multi-beam SCORE-SAR sensor, to properly test the performance of the entire system. The photonics-based SCORE SAR system will therefore show more functionalities, better performance, and lower size, weight, and power consumption than the current systems.