J4 ›› 2009, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (3): 390-437.

• Original Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Clutter modeling and analysis for spaceborne bistatic radar

LIU Nan;ZHANG Lin-rang;YI Yu-sheng;LIU Xin   

  1. (Key Lab. of Radar Signal Processing, Xidian Univ., Xi'an  710071, China)
  • Received:2008-01-29 Revised:2008-04-24 Online:2009-06-20 Published:2009-07-04
  • Contact: Liu Nan E-mail:liunaneoe@163.com

Abstract:

This paper presents a new clutter model for bistatic spaceborne radar, which takes into account the influences of the elliptic orbits of the satellites, the curving surface of the earth, the earth rotation, the range ambiguity and the geometry of the bistatic radar system on clutter and STAP performance. Based on the model proposed in this paper, an analysis of the characteristic of ground clutter is made. Simulation results show that the space-time distribution of clutter would vary with range and time, which, along with range ambiguity would result in the performance degradation of clutter cancellation. And the GMTI is unachievable if the elements of the receive array are all mounted on one satellite due to its serious Doppler frequency ambiguity and inadequate spatial resolution, which could be resolved by mounting the elements of the receive array sparsely on many distributed small satellites.

Key words: spaceborne bistatic radar, clutter modeling, STAP, distributed small satellites