PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF AZIMUTH ELECTRONIC BEAM STEERING MODE SPACEBORNE SAR

Pointing angle and pattern of the antenna can be changed swiftly to actualize the azimuth beam scanning by using electronic beam steering, which makes the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system more flexible and achieve a high resolution or cover a long strip within short time span. When the pointing angle is steered away from boresight, some aberrations may appear on the antenna pattern, e.g., the grating lobe appears, the main lobe gain decrease, and antenna pattern broadens, e.g., the aberrations result in the worsening of system performance, and complicate the corresponding performance analysis method. Conventional computation methods of performance parameters do not account for the rapid change of the antenna pattern. It introduces remarkable errors when the scanning angle is large. In this paper, a method of calculating performance parameters is proposed for the beam steering mode, which achieves the parameters by the energy accumulation in time domain. Actually, the proposed method simulates the working process of SAR and obtains accurate performance parameters. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of the grating lobe on the Azimuth Ambiguity to Signal Ratio (AASR), and present the generic Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF) choosing principle which can also prevent the ambiguous area from weighting by the grating lobe. Finally, the effect of the antenna configuration on the performance parameters is analyzed by a system example.