Abstract
The Moon-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers an exceptionally wide spatial coverage and short revisit time for the Earth observation. However, the complex imaging geometry in Moon-based SAR-Earth's target motion, where both the Earth's rotation and lunar revolution exert, poses a great challenge in signal processing and image formation. The Earth's rotation, in particular, plays a dominant role in the aperture synthesis processing of the Moon-based SAR. However, the Earth's rotation, being irregular due to perturbations, induces coordinate drifts and leads to variations in the Moon-based SAR's Doppler parameters. As a result, the image formation of the Moon-based SAR is profoundly impacted by the Earth's irregular rotation. In this paper, we investigate Earth's irregular rotational effects on the imaging performance of the Moon-based SAR through a comprehensive analysis of the relative motion between a Moon-based SAR and Earth's target. Theoretical analyses and numerical simulations show that the effects of the Earth's irregular rotation affect the geometric fidelity and azimuth focusing of the Moon-based SAR; thus accentuating the necessity for special care of the Earth's irregular rotation in light of image focusing.
Highlights
There has been a renewed interest in the development of exploration missions to the moon in recent years [1]–[4]
The range error varies with the azimuth time, which would lead to variation in the Doppler parameters, some distortions may appear in the image of the Moon-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) due to the effects of the Earth’s irregular rotation
The azimuth shift given rise by the Earth’s irregular rotation is on the order of 104 meters regardless of the look direction of Moon-based SAR, which is unacceptable for most applications
Summary
There has been a renewed interest in the development of exploration missions to the moon in recent years [1]–[4]. The range error (or the phase error) varies with the azimuth time, which would lead to variation in the Doppler parameters, some distortions may appear in the image of the Moon-based SAR due to the effects of the Earth’s irregular rotation. Phase errors induced by the range cell migration and secondary range compression terms are negligibly small compared to that given rise by the azimuth compression term It will make specific analysis of the effects of Earth’s irregular rotation with respect to azimuth imaging and range imaging based on the azimuth compression and range compression terms, respectively
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