Operations of an airborne bistatic adjunct to space based radar

Space to air bistatic concept of operations for area surveillance has renewed potential to extend the capability of space-based radars. However, design considerations of antenna size, number of simultaneous receive beams, and bistatic geometries must be analyzed in terms of area coverage rate and target signal to noise ratio. The clutter spectrum, observed from a space bourne transmitter to airborne receiver depends on both bistatic range and receiver look geometries, and changes rapidly due to the satellite velocity. Bistatic space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is required to cancel the severe clutter, and is characterized by the required degrees of freedom (DOF) to obtain target detection probability and minimum detectable velocity (MDV). Demands on the receiver's digital beamforming and STAP are presented, including the characteristics of digital signal processing. Finally, an estimate is made of the throughput requirements on a real-time processor.