Performance investigation on the high-resolution wide-swath SAR system operating in stripmap quad-pol and ultra-wide scansar mode

The High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) is the spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar system, promoted 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. In this paper, a performance investigation of the advance operational modes, Stripmap quadrature polarimetric and Ultra-Wide ScanSAR, is presented. The main design constraints are discussed, the proposed solutions explained and the achievable SAR performance numerically analyzed.