Cost-Effective Airborne SAR

Abstract

A Ku-band airborne SAR, which is a cost effective system in terms of the development and exploitation costs, has been recently developed and tested at the Institute of Radio Astronomy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The SAR system is capable of producing real-time, high-resolution images, and it can be effectively operated from light weight aircrafts. The system benefits essentially from the introduction of a novel algorithm of a real-time estimation of the aircraft orientation angles, which is based on the analysis of backscattered signals. This paper describes the principles of the SAR operation, the setup of the SAR system, its main components, and the signal processing technique used. The results obtained during flight tests are summarized as well.