Abstract: Under the given condition, distributed small satellites bistatic SAR can be considered as a kind of bistatic SAR, whose transmitter and receiver move in parallel. In this paper, an imaging method based on range distance compensation is discussed. With this method the phase of distributed small satellites bistatic SAR can be expressed in the form of monostatic SAR. Therefore, the monostatic SAR imaging algorithms can be used to process the data obtained from bistatic SAR system. To illuminate this method better, wavenumber-domain algorithm has been used. Simulation result is also provided here, it shows that this method can be effectively used in distributed small satellites bistatic SAR imaging system.