Electromagnetic modeling of the proposed DESDynI synthetic aperture radar antenna

The proposed DESDynI mission is in pre-formulation by NASA and ISRO for Earth-orbit remote sensing. The mission is envisioned as an interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) operating at L-band and S-band. The proposed instrument features a new mode of radar imaging known as SweepSAR and would be capable of fully polarimetric radar measurements. The radar instrument would be equipped with a large-aperture antenna comprising a deployable reflector antenna and arrays of patch elements. This paper focuses on the electromagnetic modeling of the instrument antenna. Results from two independent electromagnetic modeling programs are described that show good agreement in the accommodated antenna patterns.