A Multiple Beam Synthetic Aperture Radar Design Concept for Geoscience Applications

The multiple beam synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been presented as a superior alternative to conventional side-looking SAR designs for mapping earth resources from space. The multiple beam approach provides wide swath coverage at nearly constant incident angle while conserving peak power. These desirable system characteristics, however, are realized at the expense of additional signal processing. A design example illustrates the attributes of the multiple beam SAR in comparison to a conventional side-looking system. A novel beam formation processing architecture is shown which can provide simultaneous range compression while forming the beams. A configuration for the image formation processor is proposed and analyzed in terms of an analog implementation which can perform Doppler compression at speeds faster than real time. These implementation schemes indicate that on-board processing for the multiple beam SAR is possible.