Air-to-air missile-borne SAR imaging processing of forward-looking squinted data

This paper investigated the feasibility of the application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique to the air-to-air missile (AAM) control and guidance. Air-to-air missile-borne SAR was proposed to work in the burst mode in terms of the attack characteristic of AAM and the imaging requirements of SAR. At the basis of the simplified space geometry mode, the expression of the equivalent range was deduced, which was correlated with the relative velocity between the missile and the target. An Extended Chirp Scaling (ECS) algorithm with range thrice phase error correction was applied to air-to-air missile-borne SAR. The formulas for geometric correction were deduced based on the Doppler equation. Two groups of simulation results are given under 15.01 degrees forward-looking squint angle, which demonstrate the validity of the image formation and the work mode choice of air-to-air missile-borne SAR.