Efficient Full Aperture Processing of TOPS Mode Data

Inhalt:
This paper presents a very efficient wavenumber domain processor for the TOPS (Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans) imaging mode to be implemented on board European Space Agency’s upcoming Sentinel-1 operational satellite. In particular, a novel signal transform, called Moving Band Chirp Z-Transform, is introduced in order to allow the entire azimuth aperture to be focused simultaneously without any need for temporary unaliasing, which requires upsampling, or subaperture processing.