Smart antennas for space-borne synthetic aperture radars

This paper discusses smart antennas for space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR). First, some recent development in smart antennas for space-borne SAR is reviewed. Then, the paper presents a low-cost space-borne SAR system using digital beam forming on receive. The smart antenna system is also discussed, and some results are shown. The antenna system, consisting of a parabolic reflector and multi-feed array, is designed and optimized for dual-band dual-polarized digital beam-forming performance. The operating frequencies are at X and Ka bands with the center frequency of 9.6 and 35.75 GHz, respectively. The stacked dipoles and square patches with parasitic elements are employed as the feed elements at X and Ka bands. Dual-band antenna arrays are combined in the same aperture, which not only reduce the aperture of the feed array, but also coincide the center of dual-band feed arrays.