Clutter modeling and analysis for spaceborne bistatic radar

This paper presents a new clutter model for bistatic spaceborne radar, which takes the influences on clutter and STAP performance into account of the elliptic orbits of the satellites, the curving surface of earth, the earth rotation, the range ambiguity and the geometry of bistatic/multistatic radar system. Based on the model proposed in this paper, an analysis of the characteristics of ground clutter is given. The simulation results show that the Space-Time distribution of clutter would vary with range and time, which along with range ambiguity would result in serious performance degradation in clutter cancellation. And the performance of GMTI is poor due to the serious Doppler frequency ambiguity and inadequate spatial resolution if the elements of the receiving array are all mounted on one satellite, which could be resolved with the elements of the receiving array mounted on many sparsely distributed small satellites along with the non-simultaneous space-time samples technique.