Wide area surveillance concepts based on geosynchronous illumination and bistatic unmanned airborne vehicles or satellite reception

This paper describes a space-based radar surveillance concept employing geosynchronous illumination and bistatic reception on either unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) or low-orbit satellites. Two classes of surveillance are considered: that of aircraft targets (generically designated as “airborne moving target indication” or AMTI) and that of slow-moving ground targets (generically designated as “ground moving target indication” or GMTI). While the bistatic concepts are hardly new, the emergence of high-speed processing to support large-scale beamforming for AMTI, and MTI-SAR for GMTI, have made these approaches feasible for space-based theater surveillance resulting in substantial cost and performance advantages over more conventional monostatic approaches when only limited regions (i.e. on or two theater-sized areas) need to be covered at any one time