ScanSAR processing using the Fastscan system

The Fastscan system is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processor for Radarsat. It is capable of producing full resolution ScanSAR imagery in one quarter real-time and reduced resolution imagery in real-time. The purpose of this paper is first to provide an overview of the Fastscan system and secondly to outline some of the processing issues related to ScanSAR. ScanSAR is a SAR imaging technique for achieving wide swath coverage using multiple subswaths. A steerable radar beam switches among the multiple subswaths. The effect of the segmentation of each beam dwell on the design of the azimuth processing algorithm is investigated. The result of the algorithm design is an azimuth compression algorithm based on deramping with short azimuth bursts.