High Resolution,Wide Swath Synthetic Aperture Radar Using Multiple Transmit-receive Apertures

Inhalt:
The most important specifications of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) are resolution and swath width. But in conventional SAR, there is a well known trade-off between them because of the pulse mode. The Doppler bandwidth as well as the azimuth resolution are confined by the pulse repetition frequency (PRF), on the other hand, the PRF also determine the imaging width without ambiguities in the range direction. Only one of them can be improved in conventional SAR. A method named Multiple Azimuth Beam(MAB) with single transmitter is proposed to solve these difficulties in previous articles. By this method the swath is about N(beam number) times wider than that of the equivalent conventional SAR ,or the azimuth resolution can be improved by a factor of approximately N. In this paper, we proposed a new method using multiple transmit-receive apertures to further improve the swath width and resolution in azimuth.