The satellite has been created by an industrial consortium led by Thales Alenia Space Italy as prime contractor, with Astrium Germany being responsible for the CSAR payload, incorporating the central radar electronics sub-system developed by Astrium UK.

The spacecraft is a three-axis, stabilised satellite, characterised by sun, star, gyro and magnetic field sensors, a set of four reaction wheels dedicated to orbit and attitude control and three torque rods as actuators to provide steering capabilities on each axis. The satellite is equipped with two solar array wings capable of producing 5 900 W (at end of life) to be stored in a modular battery.

The satellite is based on the PRIMA (Piattaforma Italiana Multi Applicativa) bus, building on the experience gained from RADARSAT-2 and COSMO-SKYMED, which use the same bus. The bus provides highly accurate pointing knowledge (better than 0.004°) on each axis, high pointing accuracy (about 0.01° on each axis) and real-time orbit determination together with a dedicated propulsion system for precise orbit control.

The reference orbit will be maintained within an Earth-fixed orbital tube of a diameter of 100 m (RMS) during normal operation.

The satellite platform provides features for the management of the attitude and  orbit control systems, data handling, propulsion, power, thermal control, spacecraft autonomy and failure detection identification and recovery, and commmunication with the ground.

The total mass of the spacecraft at launch is approximately 2 300 kg.