On feasibility of a distributed SAR formation of mini satellites aiming at emulating the present state-of-the-art SAR systems

Abstract:
The paper analyzes the feasibility and the performances of a distribute formation of cost-effective Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites. In this paper, after introducing the basis of the formation of minisatellites, we focus on the problem of properly recombining the data received by each platform in order to get rid of the azimuth ambiguities and poor NESZ performances due to the small antenna and the low power transmitted by SmallSat and CubeSat. Here, we present a new recombination algorithm operating in the 2D transformed domain and able to accommodate satellites position slightly out the pure along track displacement. This turns out to be of great value to make the concept robust towards error on the control of the position of the satellites within the formation itself. In the last section, taking advantage of an End to End (E2E) simulator, we report the results of a concept emulating Sentinel 1. A sensitivity analysis w.r.t. realistic impairments (e.g. orbit knowledge and bistatic phase synchronization) is presented with the objective of deriving some preliminary mission-design requirement.