Analysis of Steering Approach for High Resolution Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar with Large Scanning Angle

Abstract

In high-resolution spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system design, spotlight and sliding spotlight imaging mode are generally applied. As the increasing resolution and swath length in azimuth, the required scan angle of the antenna pattern become larger. However, due to curved orbits of satellites, the scan speeds and the steering angles are spatial variable. In this condition, the traditional steering method with one dimensional uniform scannning speed is inadequate. Therefore, in this paper, the two dimensional scanning regulation of steering angle of antenna pattern is analyzed in detail. All the analysis and simulation results demonstrate the particularities and show the required two-dimensional nonlinear scanning angles for high-resolution spaceborne SAR system.