Apsidal Precession Effects on the Lunar-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Performance

There have been considerable interests in the lunar-based synthetic aperture radar (LBSAR) for monitoring large-scale geoscience phenomena. However, the signal distortions given rise by lunar orbital perturbations, especially the apsidal precession, are particularly severe in the LBSAR. The apsidal precession effects can induce a coordinate drift of the LBSAR, which can further lead to the variation in the range history of the LBSAR. As a result, LBSAR’s image performance might be affected. In this letter, we thoroughly investigate whether the apsidal precession effects cause the phase decorrelation in the signal of the LBSAR, and how such effects impact the LBSAR imaging. The theoretical result shows that the impact of the lunar apsidal precession mainly results in the first-order and second-order Doppler errors, which further influence the geometric location and focusing quality along the azimuth direction. Numerical simulations using the point target response show good consistency with the theoretical analysis. To this end, the lunar apsidal precession effects deserve special care in the LBSAR for high imaging quality.