Patent ID: 7884752

Claim:
A radar system, comprising: a platform movable along a platform path in relation to scenery, said scenery having a ground surface portion; a positioning device; a timing device; and a radar equipment; the positioning device, timing device and radar equipment being supported on the platform and implementing a diffraction limited synthetic aperture (SAR) technique for imaging the scenery, the radar equipment configured for collecting and holding radar raw data, the radar raw data comprising radar echo amplitudes annotated with the distance and collection time of said radar echo amplitudes, and which collected radar raw data are intertwined with platform position measurement data which are annotated with the respective collection time of said position measurement data, the radar equipment further configured for SAR processing using the collected radar raw data and position measurement data, wherein the radar equipment is adapted to calculate, by iteration, a sequence of summations of length k of radar amplitudes, annotated with distance and angular parameters, defined with respect to a common origin in 3-dimensional space, and wherein the common origin is defined at a location along a vector formed by the vector sum P 0 P 1 +P 1 P 2 , . . . , +P k−1 P k of k connected 3-dimensional vectors P 0 P 1 , P 1 P 2 , . . . P k−1 P k each containing a respective origin of each radar amplitude term in the summation, and each called a sub-aperture, and wherein the radar equipment is adapted to initiate the iteration process in a first iteration stage by regarding radar raw data as the radar amplitudes, where these radar data have their origins along vectors starting and ending in 3-dimensional points given by the positioning measurements carried out.