syntheticapertureradar-uah-engineering（13页）.docVIP

2.0 SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR 2.1 INTRODUCTION The term synthetic aperture radar (SAR) derives from the fact that the motion of an aircraft (airplane, satellite, UAV, etc.) is used to artificially create, or synthesize a very long, linear array. The reason for creating a long array is to provide the ability to resolve targets that are closely spaced in angle, or cross range (usually azimuth). This, in turn, is driven by one of the main uses of SARs: to image the ground or targets. In both cases, the radar needs to be able to resolve very closely spaced scatterers. Specifically, resolutions in the order of a few feet are needed. To realize such resolutions in the range coordinate the radar uses wide bandwidth waveforms. To realize such resolutions in cross range very long antennas are required. To get an idea of what we mean by “long” antenna, let’s consider an example. Suppose we are trying to image a ground patch at a range of 20 Km. We decide that to do so we want a cross range resolution of 1 m. We can approximately relate cross range distance, , to antenna beamwidth, , and range, , by (1) as shown in Figure 1. For and we get or about 0.003°! The beamwidth of a linear array with uniform illumination can be approximately related to antenna length by . (2) If we assume that the radar of the above example operates at X-band and that we get . (3) Clearly, it would not be practical to use a real antenna that is as long as six football fields. Instead, a SAR synthesizes such antenna by using aircraft motion and signal processing. 2.2 BACKGROUND 2.2.1 Linear Array Theory Before we discuss SAR processing we want to discuss some properties of SAR. We will start with a review linear arrays since a SAR synthesizes a linear array. Suppose we have a element linear array as shown in Figure 2. We have a target located at some that emits an E-field that eventually reaches each antenna element. We can write the E-field at the kth element as .