Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can achieve various performance combinations of resolution and observation bandwidth by adjusting the working modes. The imaging swath of the traditional spaceborne SAR working mode is along the satellite orbit, and the geographical trend is single; however, the geographical shape and direction of the surface scene are diverse and generally do not match the imaging swath along the orbit, resulting in a long data acquisition period, low azimuth resolution, and storage waste of computing resources. To this end, the spaceborne SAR Non-along-track imaging mode is a new method for spaceborne SAR scene matching that is characterized by an imaging zone that is no longer mechanically along the satellite orbit but is generated according to the actual geographical direction of the scene to achieve “customization” that matches the scene imaging. In this paper, the main opportunities and challenges faced by the new mode of spaceborne SAR scene matching are discussed from the aspects of information acquisition and imaging processing, and the principled verification of the spaceborne SAR Non-along-track imaging mode is provided through a computer simulation.
