Configuration study of missile-borne bistatic forward-looking SAR

As a special bistatic SAR imaging mode, missile-borne bistatic forward-looking synthetic aperture radar (MBFL-SAR) has many potential applications in precision terminal guidance of missile. The properties of this new and special configuration are described and analyzed in this paper. Range history and Doppler history are analyzed and derived firstly, and then expressions of range and Doppler resolution are determined based on the gradient method. The key parameters affecting the imaging ability are found out to help to design the proper system and motion parameters of this configuration. The simulation results show that tiny changes of 2-D resolution during the synthetic aperture time should be considered when designing the imaging algorithm of MBFL-SAR.