Yaw and Pitch Steering Using a Nonlinear Least Square Approach for Spaceborne SAR Systems

In this paper, we investigate the attitude control algorithms for antenna steering of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR). They are based on the method of Nonlinear Least Squares (NLS), which has the ability to fast calculate the attitude angles (yaw and pitch) of the satellite platform. Doppler centroid and Doppler slope versus range may both be set to zeros by satellite attitude control. Since the Least Mean Squares (LMS) type algorithm needs many iterations to converge, Newton’s method may be chosen to accelerate its performance. Computer simulations demonstrate the numerical precision and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithms. As a consequence, we may apply the NLS method to the SAR yaw steering issue with good results.