AN NOVEL AIRBORNE MIMO-SAR SYSTEM BUILT IN IECAS

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems in forthcoming surveillance and reconnaissance tasks have to meet increasingly severe demands. The next generation of top-level SAR systems will comprise high resolution wide swath (HRWS) imaging capability, highly sensitive ground moving target indication (GMTI) and a multitude of sophisticated operational modes. Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar systems, which can acquire more degrees of freedom, offer new potential solutions to future missions. In this paper, we introduce a novel airborne MIMO-SAR system built in IECAS. The proposed system contains a reconfigurable phased array, two transmit channels, and four receive ones. Thereby, it can realize 0.3m resolution for 30km swath, multimodal operation of wide swath imaging, spotlighting, ground-moving target indication (GMTI) et al. The system design and the orthogonal waveform scheme are detailed, along with the flight experimental results.