Possible Sources of Imaging Performance Degradation in Advanced Spaceborne SAR Systems Based on Scan-On-Receive

The scan-on-receive capability is a fundamental feature of advanced spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems for high-resolution wide-swath imaging. The achievable SAR imaging performance depends on the possibility to properly collect the backscattered energy of interest, and to effectively suppress undesired returns. Nevertheless, the related signal model, reported in the literature, does not reflect the complexity of a real acquisition scenario. This paper identifies possible sources of image quality degradation, generally neglected, specific of this kind of systems. It provides a first analysis of their effect in dependence of instrument and acquisition geometry parameters, as support for tasks of system design and image quality assessment.