SISAR imaging for space debris based on nanosatellites

Theodorou, Ilias and Ilioudis, Christos and Clemente, Carmine and Vasile, Massimiliano and Soraghan, John (2020) SISAR imaging for space debris based on nanosatellites. IET Radar Sonar and Navigation, 14 (8). pp. 1192-1201. ISSN 1751-8784 (https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-rsn.2019.0574)

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Abstract

The increasing amount of space debris poses a growing challenge in the development of space travel. In previous work, a proposed system comprising of a low budget space-borne passive radar based on CubeSAT, flying in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), demonstrated promising results in terms of space debris detection performance. In this work, a novel shadow inverse synthetic aperture radar (SISAR) model for space debris imaging based on nanosatellite is presented. An analysis of the received forward scattering signal is provided along with a novel model for moving transmitters and receivers SISAR imaging. Using simulated data and assuming different scenarios, the performance of the new algorithm is assessed; wherein, a classification scheme is applied using the output of the SISAR algorithm for classification between simple target shapes.