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by elil17 2012 days ago
Actually, some specially designed SAR can see through buildings, but not the kind of SAR that’s in publicly available remote sensing data.

One example (of many): https://www.kurzweilai.net/seeing-through-walls-in-real-time

3 comments

Exactly. "SAR" is a very broad term encompassing various ways to make an antenna seem larger than it is. That's about all you can say about it, generically speaking.

Impulse radar with range gating substitutes time resolution for spatial resolution, and has been used to 'look' through walls with varying degrees of success. I think you can even buy a studfinder that uses similar principles.

Also, when you catch yourself writing things like this:

    One of our radar scientists accurately 
    described the phenomenon (to reporters,
    presumably): It helps to think of it 
    just as your brain’s interpretation of 
    a two dimensional representation of the
    coherent sum of backscatter responses 
    from electromagnetic waves.
.... it's probably time to hire some marketing folks.
It helps to think of a monad as just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor
> it's probably time to hire some marketing folks

Engineering PhD students coached on outreach presentation of their thesis sometimes improve dramatically in just a few hours. Some not so much.

That science guy has a good sense of humor.
That has a range of 20 m and produces an image of an amorphous blob out of a stationary target. They also don't give the frequency or the power used. Doing this with a 100 kg satellite from 525 km away would be slightly more difficult.
Highest frequencies like used in airport scanners