274 11.6 Airborne and Space-Based Radar Issues ridge in Figure 11.6. A target, slightly offset from this clutter ridge, is also shown [10, pp. 51-64]. The plot at the top of Figure 11.6 shows the angular response of the antenna. ‘The clutter fills the beam and screens the target. Similarly, the plot at the right of the figure shows the radial-velocity response of a pulse-Doppler processor. Here, the clutter fills the region 4MDV, screening the target. Neither form of independent processing will allow detection of the target. With STAP, the angle and radial- velocity data are jointly processed, allowing detection of the target. STAP involves processing of the M pulses in the pulse train with each of the N clements in the linear array that forms the azimuth beam. Thus, the processing has a dimensionality of NM, which may be orders of magnitude greater than the process ing for cither array beam formation (N elements), or pulse-Doppler processing (M pulses). For example, with 500 linear array elements and 200 pulses processed, NM = 105. STAP processing involves calculation of NM complex weights that, when applied to the signal data, will minimize the interference. The signal data in each range-resolution interval is then processed to yield the desired target signal. Both of these steps involve NM x NM matrix inversions [10, p. 65-71]. This processing may be computationally intense. However, NM degrees of free- dom are rarely needed to cancel the interference, and STAP processing usually employs reduced-rank processing, reducing the computational requirements [10, pp. 114—162]. Much current STAP research is addressing techniques for reducing the computational requirements [11]. Application of STAP cancels jammers as well as clutter. However, the jamming interference occurs at fixed angles independent of Doppler frequency. The sidelobe canceling technique described in Section 10.3, or its equivalent using an N-clement matrix, may be used. Thus, STAP is not required just for jamming cancellation, but if it is applied for mainlobe clutter cancellation, it cancels jammers as well. Factors that may limit the performance of STAP include: * Clutter that is nonstationary, and clutter that is discrete; * Clutter internal motion and scintillation; * Uncorrected antenna motion perturbations; + Radar transmitter and receiver instabilities. Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) SAR is used to generate two-dimensional images of terrain and associated ground targets. Conventional radar may provide good range resolution by using wideband waveforms (see Chapter 4). However, the cross-range resolution is limited by the radar azimuth beamwidth, 0,, t0 RO,. For example, with a 50-MHz signal bandwidth, the range resolution is 3m. With a grazing angle of 20°, the ground resolution in the range dimension is 3.2m (see Section 9.1). An azimuth beamwidth as small as 3 mrad, produced by an 11-m aperture at X-band, provides a cross-range resolution of 300m at a range of 100 km, two orders of magnitude greater than the range resolution (see Section 8.2).11.6 _Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) 275 As the name suggests, SAR produces the effect of very large airborne or space- based apertures, creating very narrow effective beams that can give cross-range resolution comparable to the range resolution. In an SAR mode, the moving radar views the target from successive locations of the antenna. The signal returns are combined coherently to give the effect of a large aperture that is equal in length to the space occupied by the antenna during the processing interval. This is illustrated in Figure 11.7. The real-aperture antenna having a dimension of wa, produces a beamwidth, Ox, of Altay a8 shown in Figure 11.7(a), giving a cross-range resolution of Ri/tv,,. Figure 11.7(b) shows the same real aperture as it moves through several successive positions to create a synthetic aperture having a dimension yy. The angular resolution, or beamwidth, @,,, produced by this syn- thetic aperture is given by [12, pp. 21-4-21-7): 64, =A Qw.) (11.8) and the cross-range resolution, ACR, is given by [1, p. 616]. ACR =RY Qs) (11.9) ‘The factor of two in the denominators of (11.8) and (11.9) is a consequence of radar transmission and reception being done independently at each successive antenna location in the synthetic array, while a real aperture illuminates the target with a single field and receives the composite target return from that illumination [12, p. 159]. For example, if the synthetic-aperture dimension is 500m, the SAR beamwidth at X-band is about 0.032 mrad, and the cross-range resolution at a range of 100 km r ® % HW) ® Figure 11.7 Ilustration of real-aperture and synthetic-aperture beam formation. (a) Real aper- ture. (b) Synthetic aperture.276 Airborne and Space-Based Radar Issues is 3.2m, the same as the range resolution in the previous example. For a platform velocity of 300 mis, the time to generate this synthetic aperture is 1.67 sec. Such an SAR could generate images of the terrain and targets with resolution of 3.2m in the two orthogonal dimensions. To avoid grating lobes in the SAR beam pattern, the synthetic aperture must be sampled often enough to produce the effect of a filled array (see Section 3.3). The required radar PRF is given by [13, pp. 21-18-21-21): AV PRE > (11.10) Since SAR relies on platform motion to generate the synthetic aperture, it may not be used by stationary platforms such as airships or synchronous satellites. A similar technique, called inverse SAR (ISAR), is sometimes used to image targets that are moving past a radar, or are rotating [1, pp. 617-618 and 640-651). SAR processing uses the phase changes during the processing time to determine the angular position of stationary ground objects. Moving targets that have radial velocity have additional linear phase change from pulse to pulse, which makes them appear offset in angle from their true positions. For example, vehicles may appear to be off the roads on which they are actually traveling. When this apparent position change is a problem, special processing techniques may be used to correct for it. SAR techniques may be classified by the complexity of the processing employed and the resulting radar capabilities. Three such classes of SAR (Doppler beam sharp- ening, side-looking SAR, and spotlight SAR) are addressed below. The processing of radar returns in Doppler beam sharpening assumes linear phase progression from successive returns. This is referred to as unfocused Doppler processing. The phase changes, due to the changing target range as the radar passes the target, cause the synthetic-aperture length to be limited to [13, pp. 21-4-21-7|: w., <(R4)"" (Doppler beam sharpening) (11.11) and the resulting cross-range resolution is limited to: ACR S05(RA)'” (Doppler beam sharpening) (11.12) For example, an X-band (9.5 GHz) radar, observing targets at 100-km range, would be limited to a synthetic-aperture length of S6m, and could produce cross- range resolution no less than 28m. For platform velocity of 300 m/s, the maximum processing time is 0.19 sec. These results are summarized in column 2 of the lower part of Table 11.2, which also gives the radar characteristics in the upper part of the table. Such cross-range resolution is usually not useful for terrain imaging. However, it may be used for resolving, detecting, tracking, and measuring the characteristics of closely-spaced targets. The cross-range resolution is also limited to one-half of the real-aperture size, as discussed below for side-looking radar, but this rarely a limita- tion for Doppler beam sharpening.