Analysis of Bistatic Scattering Behavior of Natural Surfaces

In order to explore the challenges associated with bistatic radar, DLR and ONERA organized a joint bistatic airborne experiment involving E-SAR and RAMSES. This paper relates how the campaign was designed, how some of the challenges were solved, describes the differences found between images acquired with different bistatic angles, and presents the calibration procedure used to radiometrically calibrate the data. Two main geometrical configurations were flown to explore two scientific objective to simulate the cartwheel/pendulum concept (single pass interferometry with a large baseline), to evaluate the improved target characterization provided by the bistatic geometry. In this paper, we analyze the influence of the bistatic angle on the images and on the scattering of natural. This will need to be compared with a similar analysis on incidence angle agilit