The array design of the distributed space-based radar based on sunflower arrays

Spaced-based radar (SBR) systems have plenty of advantages, and it can provide both ground-moving-target indicator (GMTI) and airborne-moving-target indicator(AMT) data. The distributed arrays are attractive to SBR because they provide a high angular resolution with a long baseline. Also, they can inherently adopt small identical independent spacecrafts as sub-arrays. However, the distance between adjacent satellites is far more than half a wavelength, which arouse problems of grating lobes and high side lobes to the array synthesis. In this paper, the angular parameter of sunflower arrays is optimized using exhaustive method, furthermore, an non-uniform sparse array composed of small satellites is designed for the distributed space-based radar (DSBR) based on the sunflower array.