Airborne Aperture Synthesis Radiometers With Conformal Antenna Arrays

Airborne passive remote sensing is an important method for Earth observation. In the airborne platform, it is difficult to mount an aperture synthesis radiometer (ASR) with a large co-plane antenna array due to the limitation of aerodynamic drag. In this situation, a conformal antenna array has the advantage of achieving large antenna array to improve the spatial resolution in low frequencies. In this paper, the basic principle of an ASR with a conformal array is analyzed. To reconstruct images with large field of view (FOV), the reconstruction method is introduced. The numerical simulation is conducted to validate the proposed method.