First spaceborne experiment of digital beam forming with TerraSAR-X dual receive antenna mode

This paper presents the first spaceborne experiment of digital beam forming (DBF) on receive. The major objectives of this experiment are to demonstrate the azimuth ambiguity suppression capability of DBF employed in a spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system and evaluate its SAR imaging performance. We carried out the experiment with TerraSAR-X dual receive antenna (DRA) mode. Experimental results exhibit a significant improvement of the azimuth ambiguity suppression for non-uniformly sampled data in along-track. Furthermore, it implicate that the digital beamforming is applicable to current SAR satellites equipped with dual-channel receivers in operation. This paper describes a performance improvement compared to the standard stripmap mode in terms of the azimuth resolution and ambiguity as well.