Design and analysis of time shared imaging interferometric radiometer with asynchronous rotating scan

The synthetic aperture interferometric radiometry (SAIR) is a promising technique for microwave remote sensing. Various system configurations have been built. In this article, a new concept of time sharing sampling system with asynchronous rotating scan is proposed, which can greatly simplify the system hardware, and to a large extent overcome the technical barriers of applying high spatial resolution imaging systems in space borne earth observation. Asynchronous rotating scan (ARS) employs two groups of antenna elements, which have different arm length and separately rotating around a same central axis at different speed during the sampling scan process. It can achieve a full u-v sampling coverage even with only two antenna elements, whereas a longer imaging refresh time would be taken. More explicitly, ARS-SAIR can effectively adjust the tradeoff between the system complexity and time resolution.