Performance investigation on the High-Resolution Wide-Swath SAR system operating in Multisubpulse mode

The High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) is the spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar system, founded by the German Aerospace Centre, conceived to obtain simultaneously high spatial resolution and width swaths. Its main distinctive features are the multichannel architecture, the use of Digital Beamforming on receive and Scan on Receive algorithm. The HRWS allows for a spatial resolution of 1 m over swaths 70 km wide in the basic Stripmap mode, and a resolution of 8 m over a swath of 360 km in the advanced Ultra-Wide ScanSAR mode. In this paper a performance investigation in the novel operational mode, denoted as Multisubpulse, is presented: design constraints, proposed solutions and achievable SAR performance are explained and analyzed.