Abstract:

A special purpose synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) system has been developed and built by Hughes Aircraft Co. and Dynamics Technology, Inc. The main features of the system are a 3.2-m-long, 32-element linear array, and a data acquisition system capable of recording the elemental data in real time while preserving the phase and amplitude fidelity required by SAS processing. High-resolution, large (100[sup 2] m[sup 2]) and small (3[sup 2] m[sup 2]) SAS images of various objects will be presented that demonstrate resolutions of 20 cm at 1000 m. The innovation of the work is that resolution achievable only with short-range, high-frequency sonar has been demonstrated at ranges obtainable only with a low-frequency sonar. [Work supported by DARPA.]