This paper presents strategies and tools that have been used in work to parallelise a satellite signal processing code. The Magellan mission to map the surface of Venus using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is briefly described, the Magellan SAR processor code is outlined, and a parallelisation strategy is presented. The code’s large size and limited documentation made the use of program analysis tools essential to implement this strategy. Three tools, FORESYS, IDA and FORGExplorer, are compared, and the use of FORGExplorer to perform code analysis is described in detail. The techniques presented are of general applicability to the parallelisation of codes in other application areas.