Spaceborne/Stationary Bistatic SAR Imaging With TerraSAR-X as an Illuminator in Staring-Spotlight Mode

Abstract

This paper addresses some important aspects for the spaceborne/stationary bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) (SS-BiSAR) imaging with the transmitter, TerraSAR-X, operated in staring spotlight (ST) mode. With the large integration time reaching 7.5 s and the azimuth steering span reaching $\pm 2.2^{0}$ , several significant effects occur, including troposphere delay, precision phase and time synchronization, the curved orbit effect, azimuth spectrum aliasing problem, and efficient frequency domain focusing algorithm. To circumvent the main effects, corresponding solutions are proposed, including a precise synchronization strategy with troposphere delay correction based on the direct signal from the transmitter and a modified and integrative bistatic polar format algorithm (PFA). This paper covers the theoretical development, implementation, and analysis of the SS-BiSAR PFA based on 2-D fast Gaussian gridding nonuniform fast Fourier transform with wavefront curvature correction. Furthermore, the high-resolution ST-mode SS-BiSAR image processed by the proposed algorithm is acquired, and the differences of scattering behaviors between monostatic and bistatic SAR images are analyzed in detail.