Bistatic parasitic SAR processor evaluation

Bistatic radar systems will pay a great role in the coming decade since a large number of radar missions are being foreseen. Using existing transmitters, formations of small passive receivers will enhance our capability to gather backscatter information from Earth. A bistatic SAR system operates with separated transmitting and receiving antenna and both antennas can follow independent trajectories. In this paper, the recently developed imaging algorithm for the case where the transmitting antenna follows a rectilinear trajectory while the receiver remains in a fixed position and orientation will be evaluated. This new imaging algorithm is based on a projecting the bistatic geometry onto the chirp scaling algorithm which results on a scaling factor in the azimuth compression function. This scaling factor is derived from the bistatic configurations and assumes a flat topography. The main purpose of this paper is to determine the accuracy of the algorithm when used with real case simulated scenarios such as the airborne case where the transmitter is onboard an airplane while the receiver will be installed in the top of a high tower