Abstract: In this paper,the resolution performance for satellite borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) are analyzed in detail.The expressions of range resolution,the azimuth resolution,and the radiometric resolution have been derived.The various definitions for the radiometric resolution and the error probability also compared with each other.The resolution volume and the interpretability for SAR images are introduced.The resolution of the equivalene square cell for SAR images is also given.This paper is significant for estimating the SAR image quality and selecting reasonably the SAR system parameters.