Performance Improvement and System Design of Geo-SAR Using the Yaw Steering

The yaw steering may be ineffective to compensate for the large Doppler centroid in geosynchronous SAR (Geo-SAR) in many cases. Therefore, the available studies are concentrated on the 2-D beam-steering, rather than the yaw steering. However, the range and azimuth may be severely coupled without any beam-steering or with the 2-D beam-steering. Fortunately, we found that the yaw steering could overcome this serious problem, and can bring several benefits in terms of the performance improvement of the system. In this paper, we first illustrate the benefits of the yaw steering, and then provide two aspects of the system design with the incorporation of demonstrating the benefits of the yaw steering. The demonstrated three main benefits of the yaw steering are: 1) makes the 2-D side-lobes nearly orthogonal, and improves the imagery quality; 2) largely reduces the synthetic aperture time, and decreases the computation burden of imaging processing; and 3) substantially mitigates the azimuth-variation of raw data, and simplifies the imaging processing.