Portable Handheld Imaging Radar System Technology

Handheld radar RCS imaging could be a boon to maintainers of LO aircraft, enabling flight-line validation of maintenance actions and pre-flight mission readiness assessment. To date no system has been able to fulfill this promise. We believe that Synthetic Aperture Radar offers the best technology to solve the problems of high sensitivity, wide aperture, dense along-track element spacing, and wide frequency operation in a very small, lightweight package. In 2000-2001 we prototyped a handheld SAR radar and concluded that an accurate position measurement system was the missing piece needed to create a fieldable capability. This system should operate an aircraft reference coordinates. It should guide the user in forming an aperture so that baseline geometries can be reproduced. The position data should be used to assist image formation. In Phase 1, we propose to demonstrate the feasibility of an integrated system composed of position measurement,motion compensation, and image registration that will produce high quality imagery.