Optimal Determination of Antenna Height and Power in a Mass per Swath Width Sense for a Given Incidence Angle

An optimal antenna height and power determination is proposed for the cost-effective implementation of the spaceborne stripmap synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite. For a given azimuth resolution, the antenna height and the average transmitted RF power of the SAR antenna are determined so that the mass per swath width of a SAR satellite can be minimized with the constraints on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and ambiguities, given the SAR geometry (an altitude and an incidence angle) and radar wavelength. The illustrative design example shows that the mass per swath width of a SAR satellite, obtained from the proposed optimization, for the required SNR (SNR^req = 10 dB) and the specified incidence angle (eta = 45 deg), is about 72% of that resulted from utilizing the minimum antenna height.