Joint Master-Slave Yaw Steering for Bistatic Spaceborne SAR with an Arbitrary Configuration

Yaw steering is an important technique for bistatic spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), traditionally implemented separately at the master and slave satellites, such as the X-band TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X system. This separate yaw steering method, however, will degrade the illumination synchronization between the master and slave satellites. With the increment in frequency band and master-slave distance, the degradation will get worse, leading to intolerable azimuth resolution degradation or even failure of imaging. To solve this problem, a new joint yaw steering (JYS) method is proposed for bistatic spaceborne SAR with an arbitrary configuration in this letter. The word 'joint' means that the master and slave satellites cooperatively work to always make their beams point to an identical point on the Earth's surface. In this way, the best illumination synchronization can be achieved, contributing to the best available azimuth resolution. The presented approach has been evaluated through computer simulations.