Spaceborne Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Techniques and Applications: the SABRINA mission

This paper describes large baseline bistatic (LBB) techniques testable by the SABRINA (System for Advanced Bistatic and Radar Interferometric Application) mission and never experimented previously from two spaceborne platforms. The adjective ‘large’ does not identify a specific baseline length, but it simply remarks that phase coherence between bistatic and monostatic echoes is vanished. In a LBB observation geometry different techniques can be experimented, therefore a great number of applications can be envisaged: topography, target velocity measurements, sea wave spectra definition, bistatic radar cross section investigation, improvement of monostatic data image quality. The main features of LBB observation geometry more suitable for the application of the proposed techniques are also outlined. SABRINA is the sole scheduled mission aiming to conduct a systematic experimentation of the possible large baseline bistatic applications. The first great result of the LBB part of the mission could be the creation of an established database for bistatic scattering of both natural scenes and artificial targets, that at the present day is not available yet.