Improved Space-Based Moving Target Indication via Alternate Transmission and Receiver Switching

Ground moving target indication (GMTI) by space-based radar systems requires special antenna and data acquisition concepts to overcome the problem of discriminating target signals from clutter returns. Owing to the high satellite speed, the clutter contains a broad mixture of radial velocities within the antenna beam, leading to a large Doppler spread. Effective clutter suppression can solely be achieved by multiple aperture or phase center antennas. For space-based systems, however, the number of receiver channels connected to subapertures is very limited due to their weight, volume, and high data rates (current systems such as TerraSAR-X and RADARSAT-2 possess only two). This classical along-track interferometry architecture, in which the antenna is split into two halves, achieves only suboptimum GMTI performance. This paper presents and statistically analyzes an innovative approach to create additional independent phase centers to improve the GMTI performance considerably. The extra degrees of freedom are created by cyclical phase and amplitude switchings of the transmit/receive modules for transmitter and receiver between pulses, hence trading Doppler bandwidth for extra spatial diversity. In the first part of this paper, different strategies of spatial-temporal diversity are introduced and analyzed for realistic system parameters with respect to ambiguities and detection performance. The second part is concerned with the elaborate theoretical analysis of the relocation improvement for the spatial diversity approach.