Concept and Performance of a Stripmap-F-STEC Mode to Image Wide Swaths at High Resolution with the Novel StriX Small Satellite

To image wide swaths at high resolution is still challenging for small, NewSpace synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites.In order to overcome this limitation, Synspective, supported by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), has recently led an innovative feasibility study on the exploitation of a fully passive frequency scanning antenna according to the frequency scan for time-of-echo compression (f-STEC) technique in the small satellites of the StriX constellation.Within the joint research, a first, dedicated operational mode, denoted as stripmap-f-STEC (SM-f-STEC), suitable for small satellites in standalone operation, was developed and analyzed.The obtained results are very promising: in SM-f-STEC, for the first time, a small satellite in the 100-200 kg class would be able to generate high-quality SAR images with a swath width up to 100 km and a 2-D spatial resolution below 5 m 2 .The continuous coverage in the azimuth direction of a conventional stripmap mode is preserved.This paper presents the SM-f-STEC mode for the novel StriX satellite with frequency scanning capability: the rationale is explained and the SAR imaging performance numerically analyzed.