High-Performance SAR Processor for Spaceborne Radar

Inhalt:
The development of a SAR processor prototype at Airbus Defence and Space is reported. This product will cover a wide range of future space mission requirements, including the provision of SAR images with very high resolution. The corresponding SAR modes exhibit synthetic aperture with significant curvature and squint, they lead to excessive sizes of data vectors and matrices in the processor, and they will show defocused images if scene topography and atmosphere are ignored. It is presented how frequency-domain processors can successfully and efficiently handle such modes. A breakdown of the processing algorithm into two main steps is described: a bulk focussing and patch-based post-processing step. A sub-aperture processing approach reduces computational resources and supports parallel implementation.