Active and passive radar corner reflectors co-located with permanent GNSS stations in Sweden: Installation and performance

Artificial corner reflectors (CRs), passive (which have no electronic parts), or active ones, so called electronic CR (ECR) or compact transponders (CAT), are devices which reflect the radar signal back to the SAR satellites and provide measurement points at desired locations. Using, such devices we can measure temporal Line of sight (LOS) changes of the CRs using the InSAR technique and for example monitor the ground movements precisely.

Since January 2020, Lantmäteriet, the Swedish mapping, cadastral and land registration authority, has installed three ECRs and several types of passive reflectors (different shape and size, planned for C-band Sentinel-1 satellites) in different locations in Sweden. So far, ECRs are still functioning with no electronic failure. However, from the ESA Geodetic SAR project (https://eo4society.esa.int/projects/sar-hsu/) we experienced that the ECRs electronic characteristics are different, so individual calibrations maybe required by the manufacturer. In addition, thermal effects may also cause problems for measurements with ECRs. Therefore, instead of installing more ECRs, we switched to passive ones which have no electronics and have already shown their high-quality performance in different studies. So far, we have installed ten CRs in different locations and the goal is to continue and complement the national geodetic infrastructure of Sweden with at least twenty passive reflectors which are co-located with permanent GNSS stations. Among others, these co-located corner reflectors can potentially contribute to the development of the national and European ground motion services in future updates. Moreover, the co-location helps to map the relative ground motions estimated with InSAR to an absolute geodetic reference frame

Among different tests and performance analysis of such reflectors, we did multipath analysis to investigate if our corner reflectors cause any multipath error on nearby GNSS stations.  We looked at the coordinate time series of the twin GNSS stations at two locations, Visby and Sveg. The installed corner reflector, double back-flipped squared, in Sveg is about 6 m away from the GNSS stations whereas, in Visby, the twin corner reflectors, ascending and descending, are about 20 meters away and have a trihedral squared trimmed shape. The daily GNSS coordinate time series for three components before and after installation of the corner reflectors didn’t show any significant jump in the time series and the coordinate variations are in the range of expected mm-level variations for all stations.