Effect of Formation Design on Azimuth Ambiguity Suppression Capability in a Spaceborne Distributed SAR

Distributed Synthetic Aperture Radar (DSAR) systems represent an appealing solution to lower the overall costs and improve flexibility and efficiency of future Earth Observation missions. However, this type of systems requires receivers to fly very close to each other for enabling coherent beamforming techniques. Autonomous formation flying strategies can be employed to keep satellites within a small envelope. However, the variation over time of the distances among the satellites, that stems from the relative dynamics associated to the need of ensuring a safe formation geometry, results in a performance degradation for the beamforming over specific areas or time spans. The paper analyzes the problem of DSAR performance prediction when the satellite formation is designed exploiting the safety ellipse concept.