With the improvement of resolution and image swath, the received data amount of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is increasingly large and imposes more stringent requirement for the satellite payload and transmission link. In this paper, a novel multiple elevation beam (MEB) SAR and the processing scheme are studied to reduce the data amount. The detailed system design and the main procedures are described, and the explicit mathematic expression of the scheme is derived.
Furthermore, an exemplary SAR system is provided and the simulation results are obtained to confirm the effectiveness of our proposal. Also, the performance of the MEB SAR system is analyzed in depth, from the perspectives of data amount, signal to noise ratio (SNR), and range ambiguity to signal ratio (RASR).