Bistatic forward-looking SAR experiments using an airborne receiver

Bistatic SAR experiments using a ground-based transmitter and a forward-looking airborne receiver have been conducted in June 2011. These experiments are supposed to demonstrate the suitability of forward-looking SAR for an improvement of aircrafts' landing safety in conditions of low visibility. The feasibility of airborne bistatic forward-looking SAR was already demonstrated experimentally by the authors in 2009. This paper gives a short introduction to forward-looking radar imaging, explains the problems of monostatic SAR to image in forward direction and presents and analyzes bistatic sensor configurations as a suitable solution for high resolution imaging in forward direction.