SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR Engineering （合成孔径雷达工程）.pdfVIP

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, y , to antenna beamwidth, B , and range, R , by y RB (1) as shown in Figure 1. For y 1 m and R 20 Km we get  5105 rad or B about 0.003°! Figure 1 – Relation of Cross-Range distance to Beamwidth The beamwidth of a linear array with uniform illumination can be approximately related to antenna length by   L . (2) B If we assume that the radar of the above example operates at X-band and that  0.03 m we get L  600 m . (3) B Clearly, it would not be practical to use a real antenna that is as long as six foo