Direct Pulse Recording for Reconstruction of Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Abstract

An imaging experiment was performed utilizing a synthetic aperture radar tansmitter on the space shuttle and a receiver on an airplane. Because of this "bistatic" geometry, focusing is considerably more difficult than in a conventional monastatic SAR. Because the transmitter and receiver are moving relative to each other, the phase history of any target in the scene depends on its location in both the along-track (azimuth) and the cross-track (range) directions, and focusing thus depends on location in the image. As a result, the image must be generated from a collection of separately focused sub-images.