Geosynchronous SAR Orbit Estimation Based on Active Radar Calibrators

The Geosynchronous SAR (GEOSAR) is a system designed for continuous monitoring of a fixed region of the Earth. Differently from LEOSAR, the GEOSAR system requires very long times to form its Synthetic Aperture (SA). This entails the onset of several decorrelation sources, such as atmosphere propagation, orbit perturbations, clock drifts, that have to be compensated to avoid defocusing. In this paper, in particular, it is proposed a solution to cope with the phase error introduced by orbit perturbations within the SA by means of some Active Radar Calibrators (ARC) deployed at convenient positions in the illuminated area. Each ARC provides two-way pulse by pulse echo delay and carrier phase observations used to track the satellite position. The estimation follows an iterative approach whose steps are dividing the SA in sub-apertures, performing the estimation for each sub-aperture, applying the estimated orbit correction and repeating for longer sub-apertures.