Geometric Distortion Correction of Spaceborne GNSS-R Delay-Doppler Map Using Reconstruction

For spaceborne Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R), the delay difference of direct and reflected GNSS signals among successive snapshots changes rapidly because of the high dynamics of low earth orbital and GNSS satellites. This change has to be compensated to avoid the distortion of incoherently averaged delay-Doppler map (DDM). The method to refresh the correlation window on each coherent integration time period may require too many instrument resources or too much data to be uploaded from the ground station. This letter proposes a new postprocessing approach based on the motion degradation model of DDM and the reconstruction to replace real-time compensation. Raw sampled data from UK TechDemoSat-1 are used to verify the availability of proposed approach. The results show that after reconstruction for the distorted DDM, the DDM accuracies relative to that compensated in real time are significantly improved.