Baseline designing and implementation approach for a Geo-SAR tomography system

Abstract

This study proposes a new method to design and implement the baseline of a geosynchronous Earth orbit synthetic aperture radar (Geo-SAR) tomography system. Due to the satellite's orbital property, its ideal revisit cycle is 1 day, and it could be changed through raising or lowering the orbital height. As a result, the local ascending node longitude would move because of the orbital shifting, and all the passes' trajectories are nearly parallel. A baseline designing and implementation approach is advanced according to this characteristic. The cell array configuration and baseline length are illustrated by considering the demand of cross-range resolution and ambiguity. This study analyses and simulates the Geo-SAR tomography system baseline properties. Furthermore, a series of parallel trajectories are implemented by controlling orbital altitude as demanding during each cycle. A simulation experiment is performed to verify the efficiency and superiority of this approach, and the results show that it has a good effect on an L-band mode Geo-SAR tomography system with three-dimensional resolution ∼10 m.

Keywords

• synthetic aperture radar
• radar resolution
• Earth orbit
• radar imaging
• Doppler radar
• celestial mechanics
• implementation approach
• geosynchronous Earth orbit synthetic aperture radar tomography system
• satellite
• ideal revisit cycle
• orbital height
• local ascending node longitude
• orbital shifting
• baseline designing
• study analyses
• simulates
• Geo-SAR tomography system baseline properties
• parallel trajectories
• orbital altitude
• L-band mode Geo-SAR tomography system
• time 1.0 d
• size 10.0 m