Radar System Design

A spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is employed to illustrate the principal parameters of a SAR system. Mission parameters and system performance parameters are included. The former consists of coverage, revisit period, view scope, and lifetime. The latter comprises frequency, polarization, power, antenna gain, noise factor, loss, and imaging quality‐related parameters. The SAR system can be designed by properly optimizing the parameters to meet the requirements of the mission. SAR can be operated in different modes so as to provide radar images with a variety of resolutions, swath widths, or polarization in different applications. The operation modes of SAR include strip‐map mode, scanning mode, spotlight mode, sliding spotlight mode, mosaic mode, and terrain observation by progressive scans mode. According to the characteristics of the detected target and its background, the moving target working mode is generally divided into the ground moving target mode, the marine moving target mode, and the airborne moving target mode.