Abstract:

The oscillator phase error, as one of the decorrelation factors for the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, has different impacts on different SAR systems. The impacts of oscillator phase errors are negligible for the loworbit monostatic SAR system. However, due to the long time delay of pulse return and long synthetic aperture time, the image quality of geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO) SAR suffers from the degradation caused by the oscillator phase error. The impacts of the oscillator phase error on the GEO SAR imaging performance are investigated. Furthermore, the constraints on the oscillator phase stability are given to guarantee the GEO SAR image quality.