Spaceborne Demonstration of Distributed SAR Imaging With TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X

Multistatic or distributed satellite systems offer new and unique capabilities necessary for Earth observation with high spatial and temporal resolution. This letter describes a multistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) experiment employing the satellites TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X. In order to demonstrate distributed SAR imaging from space, special data acquisitions with a dedicated geometry were performed. The data evaluation approach is outlined and azimuth profiles over a region with high-contrast backscatter are used to evaluate the azimuth signal reconstruction performance. The results are verified with simulations performed with a flexible SAR simulator reproducing the acquired scene. Finally, the effect of target motion on the reconstruction is analyzed and discussed based on the experimental data.