Clutter Modeling and Analysis for Bistatic Space-Based Early Warning Radar with GEO Transmitter and LEO Receiver

This paper presents a study on the bistatic space-based early warning radar system, a novel concept of space-based radar in which the transmitter and receiver are mounted on a geosynchronous orbit satellite and a low Earth orbit satellite, respectively. A mathematical model is proposed to accurately describe the clutter distribution by analyzing the geometric relationship of the bistatic system and taking into account the effect of Earth’s rotation. Then the clutter distribution trajectories are given, which present the severe non-stationarity. Simulation analysis are performed to investigate the impact of system antenna pattern and actual beam illuminating range on clutter power spectrum. Finally, the signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio loss of three-dimensional space-time adaptive processing (3D-STAP) method for different spatial degrees of freedom is analyzed. This paper can provide references for the study of bistatic space-based early warning radar.