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Synthetic aperture radar interferometry is a powerful and well established remote sensing technique to extract important bio- and geophysical parameters describing the Earth's surface. However, the currently available data from spaceborne SAR sensors suffer either from temporal and atmospheric disturbances (repeat pass interferometry) or from a limited interferometric baseline (SRTM - Shuttle Radar Topography Mission). To overcome these limitations, several proposals have been made to acquire interferometric data in a single pass by using two or more independent radar satellites operating in a fully or semi-active SAR mode. This paper focuses on interferometric performance estimation for a TerraSAR-L cartwheel constellation. Assuming receiving antennas of only 3 m diameter, the ambiguity and timing analysis leading to the selection of some radar parameters is presented. The paper briefly introduces the approach to estimate the DEM (Digital Elevation Model) performance. This part includes a discussion of the ambiguity behaviour in interferometric products. Finally, the DEM accuracies are estimated for different across-track baselines and swaths. Impacting parameters, such local ground slope, volume decorrelation or signal bandwidth are also considered. This analysis has shown that the TerraSAR-L cartwheel constellation will be an excellent means to acquire a global DEM with unprecedented height accuracy in accordance with the HRTI (High Resolution Terrain Information ) level-3 specification. The required mission time will be of the order of 1 year assuming an average data collection of 3 minutes per orbit. In a later mission phase, the performance may even be improved beyond the HRTI level-3 specification by increasing the length of the interferometric baselines.