Coherent multistatic SAR collections and target phenomenology

A coherent multiplatform synthetic aperture radar system, with appropriately structured waveforms, can be used multistatically to collect imagery with greater efficiency than a monostatic only system. There are challenges, however, associated with coherent multistatic collection which include maintaining coherency across the full multistatic aperture as well as understanding the scattering phenomenology exhibited in imagery collected in this way. This paper utilizes a technique for cohering multistatic synthetic apertures and in conjunction with observations from General Dynamicspsila RailSAR instrument, explores real-world scattering phenomenology associated with multistatics. A two platform system with three multistatic apertures is emulated, and comparisons between the resulting multistatic imagery and imagery obtained from the equivalent resolution monostatic aperture are presented. The observations cover a 4 GHz frequency band centered at 10 GHz (X-band) and subtend a large azimuthal angle resulting in centimeter level resolutions in both range and azimuth.