At the end of 2016, TELEMACO project, aiming at the development of enabling technologies to the design of an innovative Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system based on Forward Looking SAR technique (FLoSAR), reached its natural deadline. Differently from conventional SAR, this system allows to "look" in front of the aircraft on which it is installed and acquire high resolution images of the forward territory, useful to the aircraft guidance.

Besides of the typical applications of a conventional SAR, FloSAR can also be used to precisely align the aircraft on which it is installed with the runway for landing also in case of scarce visibility conditions.

TELEMACO project, funded by the Ministry for Research & University through the Distretto Aerospaziale Campano (DAC), was coordinated by MBDA Italy with the partnership of Universities such as "Federico II" and "Sannio", research centers such as CIRA and CORISTA, as well as small and medium enterprises such as Foxbit, TEMIS and TSDev.

CIRA, in particular, contributed to the architecture definition for the insertion in the radar system of the electronic beam steering function and the development of a demonstrator for the verification of this functionality. Furthermore, CIRA investigated the possibility to optimize the performance of phased array used by the radar system and developed a processing tool to campute the synthetic parameters of a generic phased array by basing on the number of radiating elements, their spatial arrangement, the operating frequency and the pointing direction.