Single Flight Stereo Radar Using a Mechanically Slewed Array and an Electrically Squinted Array

An improved single flight technique for obtaining stereo radar image pairs is described and its feasibility is analyzed. This improved technique uses a unique combination of two different antenna beam characteristics which permits the illumination of a terrain point from nearly the same aircraft position while providing image geometry differences sufficient to provide useful parallax data. The analysis encompasses theoretical performance analyses, tradeoff analyses and, error analyses. The error analyses are also used to select a best set of reconstruction equations for computation of the terrain point orthographic position and height from image position measurements made with a stereocomparator. Comparisons are made of the theoretical and error performance for the improved single flight technique with respect to a previously implemented two-flight technique and a previously proposed single flight technique. (Modified author abstract)