A New Method of Zero-Doppler Centroid Control in GEO SAR

Yaw steering is a method of Doppler centroid compensation performed by attitude steering of the satellite platform. However, the conventional yaw steering method does not work well as the satellite orbit height becomes higher, such as with the geosynchronous Earth orbit synthetic aperture radar (GEO SAR) which has 36 000-km orbit height. This letter primarily analyzes the Doppler properties of the GEO SAR in the satellite local coordinate systems, and gives the calculation formulas of the Doppler centroid frequency and instantaneous Doppler bandwidth. Based on the vector analysis, a new calculation method is proposed for the 2-D attitude steering angles in GEO SAR. The new method, considering Earth´s rotation and elliptical orbit effects, can accurately compensate the Doppler centroid to zero. Then, according to the 2-D attitude steering angles and the characteristics of GEO SAR, the 2-D phase scan method is put forward to carry out the highly accurate compensation of Doppler centroid, which can avoid the difficulty of rotating and stabilizing the GEO SAR system. The simulations validate the conclusion in this letter.