Attitude-Steering Strategy for Squint Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar.

For spaceborne synthetic aperture radar systems, minimizing the Doppler centroid variation over the range swath may bring many benefits, including improving the accuracy of the Doppler centroid estimation, alleviating the complexity of the data processing, and so on. In the current literature, it is well known that the Doppler centroid for the broadside-looking mode can be reduced to 0 Hz by employing 2-D attitude-steering law which includes a yaw and a pitch steering. However, for the squint mode, 2-D steering is not enough. In this letter, the iso-Doppler surface is first derived using the motion state vectors of the Earth and the satellite, based on which the 3-D attitude-steering strategy including an additional roll steering is proposed to minimize the Doppler centroid variation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated by the simulation results when the antenna pointing error is either absent or present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]