Radar sensors based on communication low Earth orbiting satellites microwave emission

The test results confirmed the possibility of air target detection using microwave energy generated by LEOS (low Earth orbit satellites). The authors´ results also could be supported by theoretical power budget evaluation. Taking into account, that the radar cross section corresponds in the authors´ case to the bistatic RCS (for traditional air targets that RCS is 10-20 dB larger than for monostatic radar), a small fighter plane could be effectively detected at the 100-km distance. The maximum detection range calculations show a very optimistic result. Nevertheless, there are fundamental and technical problems arising for the systems design, such as signal/clutter separation, multi-beam antennas utilization for parallel space observation, range resolution as well time variant dependence on system parameters due to satellites motions as well as some uncertainties in the transmitting signal parameters