Time Augmented SAR (TSAR)

The objective of TSAR is to deliver high precision time synchronization units including 100 MHz Sinewave, Digital PPS, or Single Shot Trigger, and Serial Time-of-Day to the Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL) to demonstrate the advantages of pico-second enabled bistatic SAR for their standoff explosive hazard detection system.Ziva will develop and demonstrate pico-second time synchronization between a pair of radios; where each platform consists of one radio using wireless two-way time transfer to provide a coherent reference clock to ARL’s SAR radio.  This test will be used to optimize and integrate the time synchronization system with the SAR system into a modern Radio Frequency System-on-a-Chip (RFSoC).An optimal RF front-end will be developed for self and cross-channel reciprocity to minimize error to Two-Way-Time-Transfer (TWTT).  Ziva will determine the feasibility of integrated RF front ends to lower the SWaP-Cost of future SAR systems.  The time augmented bistatic SAR system will be verified by ARL in field trials.The Option effort of TSAR is to explore resolution enhancement of the SAR system created in the baseline effort via increasing the bandwidth of the system. Increasing the bandwidth and subsequent resolution of the SAR system necessitates tighter tolerances on both the relative clock drift across the platforms and better spatial knowledge of the relative motion of the platforms used to synthesize the aperture.  Ziva will focus on augmenting the relative navigation of the bistatic platforms via the addition of time-difference-of-arrival and time-of-arrival upgrades to the TWTT system to increase the resolution on the SAR system.