Spaceborne Radar Altimeter Mistakenly Pointing Angle Estimation And Compensation Study

Radar altimeter is designed to measure the altitude from the satellite to theocean surface, the surface wave height and the ocean-surface backscatter coefficient.With the development of satellite altimetry techniques, the accuracy becomes better.The error of the altitude caused by the mispointing angle must be corrected duringground processing. The estimation and correction of mispointing on radar altimeter are studied inthis thesis. The following are the main works: The principles of radar altimeter and its techniques of obtaining parameters wasanalyzed .The methods of estimating the mispointing angle were reviewed. The mechanism of estimating the mispointing angle and the general methods ofestimating the parameters were analyzed in detail, then chose the nonlinear leastsquare(NLS) to estimate the mispointing angle. The theoretical accuracy of estimating the mispointing angle by NLS was studiedin detail. Waveforms were simulated through computer program and the mispointing anglewas estimated from the waveform. The computer simulation shows that NLS can beused to estimate the mispointing angle, furthermore get high degree of accuracy. The error of altitude caused by mispointing was analyzed and calculated. Themethod of correction was proposed and its accuracy was calculated too.