Higher order clutter mitigation in bistatic space-based radar systems using a knowledge-aided STAP approach

Bistatic space-based radar (SBR) systems offer several advantages for performing wide area ground moving target indication (GMTI) surveillance. However, in bistatic systems there is inherent non-stationarity of the clutter covariance matrix due to the bistatic geometry. This non-stationarity presents challenges for performing space-time adaptive processing (STAP) to separate ground targets from the clutter returns. Various approaches for mitigating the clutter non-stationarity in bistatic systems have been presented in the literature by different authors. In realistic bistatic SBR GMTI scenarios, there are higher order effects, in addition to the first order effect of ground clutter non-stationarity, that can present significant additional challenges for performing STAP.