Enhanced Resolution Stripmap Mode Using Dynamic Metasurface Antennas

To maintain sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for image reconstruction and image interpretation, conventional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems must trade off resolution and scene size. This paper proposes a new SAR mode of operation, which improves resolution while maintaining good SNR and a large scene size. It leverages the unique properties of dynamic metasurface antennas (MSAs) to subsample a large virtual beamwidth utilizing multiple small distinct antenna beams. Due to this parallelization in scene sampling, the constraints on the azimuth sampling rate can be relaxed while maintaining an aliasing-free cross range. Due to the versatile properties of MSAs and their cost effective manufacturing process, this paper proposes SAR systems, which can obtain high resolution images over a wide scene size with lower cost and complexity than competing approaches. Point-spread functions and proof-of-concept SAR simulations are shown to verify this approach. In addition, laboratory experiments using a commercial prototype MSA are presented, which show an improvement of 62% in cross-range resolution of the proposed approach, compared with the crossrange resolution of stripmap mode SAR with the same aperture.