Along-Track Multistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Formations of Minisatellites

The paper analyses an along-track multistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) formation. The formation aims at achieving a high azimuth resolution maintaining at the same time a large swath width. The case with one transmitting sensor and all receiving is analyzed (Single Input Multiple Output, SIMO). An effective and novel reconstruction, in the two-dimensional frequency domain is introduced that is able to keep low the azimuth ambiguity and achieve a recombination gain close to the theoretical one. Degradation of the system performance due to the loss of the control of formation position is analyzed using probabilistic considerations. Moreover, some innovative methods to mitigate the loss of optimality are introduced and evaluated using simulations. Finally, considerations on the impact of the across-track non zero baseline are discussed.