Launched in November 1995, RADARSAT-1 provided Canada and the world with an operational radar satellite system capable of timely delivery of large amounts of data. Equipped with a powerful synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument, it acquired images of the Earth day or night, in all weather and through cloud cover, smoke and haze.
RADARSAT-1 was a Canadian-led project involving the Canadian federal government, the Canadian provinces, the United States, and the private sector. It provided useful information to both commercial and scientific users in such fields as disaster management, interferometry, agriculture, cartography, hydrology, forestry, oceanography, ice studies and coastal monitoring.