Contribution of TerraSAR-X to digital beamforming experiment for future SAR techniques

Operational spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems have been contributing to global high-resolution data acquisition for various applications. Furthermore, as an aggregate of cutting-edge technologies, modern SAR prompts technology advance at the same time. TerraSAR-X, which is one of the operational SAR satellites in Germany, provides likewise data for a wide spectrum of scientific and commercial usages. Particularly, TerraSAR-X dual receive antenna (DRA) mode campaigns obtained a plenty of experimental data sets for advanced SAR techniques. This paper presents the first spaceborne experiment of digital beamforming (DBF) using the TerraSAR-X DRA mode and its results. The major objectives of this experiment are the demonstration of ambiguity suppression capability of DBF, which is considered as a key technique in future SAR systems. Experimental results exhibit a significant improvement of SAR imaging performance for non-uniformly sampled data in along-track.