Near-space slow SAR high-resolution wide swath and sustained imaging technology

Sustained high-resolution imaging for wide swath area is getting emergence. However, conventional airborne and spaceborne SAR can hardly achieve them simultaneously. Near-space technology draws much attention in this aspect. Current researches of near-space SAR focus on fast platform which encounters contradiction between azimuth high resolution and range wide swath. To solve it and achieve sustained imaging, low-speed SAR is introduced in this article. Joint aperture technology is then proposed to make full use of the redundant pulse repetition frequency and obtain wide area imaging fast. Performance of the example system given at the end of the article verifies the effectiveness of the proposed near-space low-speed SAR high-resolution wide swath and sustained imaging concepts.