Correlating SAR (CoSAR)

Concept, performance analysis, and mission concepts

Conference paper (2013)

Authors

Paco López-Dekker Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR)
Francesco de Zan Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR)
Marc Rodriguez-Cassola Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR)
Gerhard Krieger Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR)
Affiliation
External organisation
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Published Date

2013

Language

English

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Affiliation

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Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems construct the equivalent to a very long antenna array by coherently combining radar echoes of a scene acquired along the trajectory of a space- or airborne radar. A key underlying assumption, or requirement, is that the observed scene stays coherent during the acquisition. This is true for static scenes, in particular when the acquisition time is kept short. For decorrelating targets, the azimuth resolution achievable by a SAR system is limited by the coherence time of the targets, τcoh, which limits the length of the synthetic aperture to the product of τcoh and the azimuth velocity of the system. Typical cases where this can be an issue is for the observation of water surfaces, where the coherence times at microwave frequencies are typically well below 100 ms, which makes them short compared to the typically associated integration times.