Extremely High Frequency Rail-based Synthetic Aperture Radar

The US Army is seeking a high-resolution, rail-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging system capable of operating within the 100 – 300GHz frequency range. Wide bandwidth SAR technologies at this frequency range provide the potential for supporting applications that require high-resolution, non-destructive imaging. In response to this opportunity, MaXentric is proposing a rail-based SAR system codenamed M-CRISP (Multi-Channel Rail-based Radar Imaging Sensor Platform). The proposed architecture moves a set of radar transceivers over a large effective aperture to increase the achievable resolution. Advanced multi-band super-resolution techniques are applied to the radar measurements to produce high-resolution images for scatterer detection and classification. During the Phase I effort, our team designed a multi-band sensor architecture and simulated candidate super-resolution SAR algorithms. A dual-band mmW SAR system was constructed and used to demonstrate algorithm performance. During the proposed Phase II effort, modular prototype SAR platforms will be constructed to allow testing and demonstration a several mmW and EHF bands of interest. These measurement platforms will be used refine candidate imaging, detection, and classification algorithms. During Phase II, the M-CRISP system will be tested for several potential Phase III applications to assess its performance and provide insight on design changes for future SAR imaging