Study on the attitude steering scheme of satellite platform for distributed spaceborne SAR

Compared with conventional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) on a single platform, distributed spaceborne SAR can realize imaging from multiple viewing angles by separating the transmitting and receiving satellite positions, so as to improve the capability of spaceborne SAR for a series of applications. To guarantee that echoes of distributed spaceborne SAR can be received completely and processed to generate images with high efficiency, we conduct deep research on the attitude steering scheme for the distributed SAR and build up the corresponding constraints on the transmitting and receiving satellite platforms from the perspectives of antenna beam footprint and bistatic Doppler centroid. Based on these constraints, four different attitude steering schemes have been brought forward in this paper, and their characteristics and performance are evaluated and compared via system simulations. In the end, the optimal approach for the distributed spaceborne SAR has been derived from the above analysis and simulations.