• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
• /
• v.43 no.5
• /
• pp.466-471
• /
• 2015

In this paper, the design technique of the wide swath TOPS(Terrain Observation by Progressive Scan) imaging mode is introduced. The TOPS mode overcomes the scalloping limitations imposed by ScanSAR mode by steering the antenna pattern along track direction during the acquisition of a burst. This paper reports the operation concept of TOPS imaging and mode design result to extract the SAR operational parameters. Finally, several analyzed results such as IRF(Impulse Response Function), NESZ(Noise Equivalent Sigma Zero) and DTAR(Distributed Target Ambiguity Ratio) are presented.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.74-79
• /
• 2014

Conventional ScanSAR mode has been adopted in Envisat or Radarsat and played an important role to acquire wide swath SAR images for environmental surveillance. However, it suffers from the undesirable scalloping effect caused by non-homogeneity of antenna pattern while the image resolution is sacrificed. In recent years, TOPS mode has been suggested and put into use to overcome the disadvantages of the conventional scanning mode. Although TOPS mode is able to produce wide-swath SAR image in a short time interval, it demands highly complicated system design knowledge. In this paper, we present the operation principle of TOPS mode and a full SAR simulation is performed to generate TOPS SAR raw data. Azimuth antenna pattern is modified during TOPS mode operation and it is shown that the undesired scalloping effect is suppressed in the generated SAR image.