Abstract: For spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) processing, Doppler property influences the azimuth performance and the imaging accuracy directly. In this paper, the Doppler centroid frequency expression based on elliptical orbit is derived analytically. The influences of the yaw steering and the pitch steering are analyzed respectively. Then, a new method called elliptic orbit total Zero Doppler steering is proposed, and a simulation for TerraSAR-X parameters shows its advantages. The simulation results indicate that this method reduces the Doppler centroid 100 times smaller than currently applied yaw steering methods, and 5 times smaller than the circular orbit total Zero Doppler steering, which illuminates the applicability of the method.