The design and development of airborne high-resolution topographic imaging radar in CRL

The Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) has started to develop an X-band airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with topographic mapping and polarimetric functions from 1993. The resolution of the system will be 1.5 m. The topographic mapping function yields the height at each point in the scene by using cross track interferometry with two antennas equipped on the airplane. Whereas the polarimeter function provides the radar cross sections with phase in all parallel and cross polarizations in order to distinguish surface conditions in detail. The authors discuss the signal to noise ratio, height error and phase error for their system.