Asynchronous rotation scan for synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer

Synthetic aperture interferometric technique has wide applications in optics, radio astronomy and microwave remote sensing areas. With the increasing demands of high resolution imaging observation, a new time-sharing sampling scheme of asynchronous rotation scan is proposed to meet the technical challenge of achieving a large equivalent aperture and overcome the operating barriers of space borne application. This configuration is basically composed by two asynchronously and concentrically rotating antenna groups, whose revolving radii and speeds are different. The synthetic aperture system with asynchronous rotation scanning scheme can effectively solve the trade-off problem of system complexity, and greatly simplify the system hardware at the cost of sacrificing a certain time resolution. The basic rules and design methods of asynchronous rotation scan are investigated The Gridding method is introduced to inverse the spiral sampling data for image reconstruction. The potential applications of geostationary orbit (GEO) earth observation and solar polar orbit (SPO) plasma cloud observation are explored with numerical simulations to validate the significance and feasibility of this new imaging configuration. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 40574070, 40671121, 40701100 and 40801136) and the National High-Tech Research Program of China (“863” Program) (Grant No. 2006AA12Z141)