Abstract
Formation-flying synthetic aperture radar (FF-SAR) enables new working modes and can achieve very high performance through a series of very compact, low-weight, satellite platforms thanks to passive operations of conveniently distributed formation-flying receivers. System timing is a crucial aspect of FF-SAR. The manuscript presents a novel approach to pulse repetition frequency (PRF) selection in order to obtain a uniform distribution of samples at given platform positions. A digital beamforming algorithm is applied on a stack of monostatic repeat-pass images collected by the Sentinel-1 system to test the validity of the PRF selection method. Processed images were thus properly selected to achieve the best merit index measuring the quality of samples distribution. The results show that: (a) the image resulting from beamforming features better azimuth ambiguity-to-signal ratio and (b) the proposed approach for PRF selection allows one to individuate a subset of the available images leading to uniform distribution of samples which can be used to support FF-SAR processing.
Highlights
A formation-flying synthetic aperture radar (FF-SAR) is a spaceborne distributed synthetic aperture radar [1,2,3] in which the signal emitted by the transmitter and scattered from the area of interest is not collected by a single receiver but by many conveniently distributed formation-flying receivers [4]
Such a redundancy can be exploited in different ways [13,14,15,16,17], from Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI) to High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) imaging, pending the application of suitable reconstruction algorithms [7,8,9,13] and the availability of a sufficient number of receivers
The developed approach to pulse repetition frequency (PRF) selection in FF-SAR was tested on an interferometric data stack of Sentinel-1 images
Summary
A formation-flying synthetic aperture radar (FF-SAR) is a spaceborne distributed synthetic aperture radar [1,2,3] in which the signal emitted by the transmitter and scattered from the area of interest is not collected by a single receiver but by many conveniently distributed formation-flying receivers [4]. The factor N can be interpreted as the redundancy, or the maximum number of degrees of freedom [13] of the distributed system when compared to a monostatic SAR. Such a redundancy can be exploited in different ways [13,14,15,16,17], from Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI) to High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) imaging, pending the application of suitable reconstruction algorithms [7,8,9,13] and the availability of a sufficient number of receivers
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