Airborne Very Long Baseline Interferometry and Geolocation

Author

Carlsen, Eric C. ; Kolanek, James C. ; Sharpin, David L.

Author_Institution

Spectral Syst., Inc., OH

fYear

2006

fDate

12-14 July 2006

Firstpage

334

Lastpage

338

Abstract

A method is presented of performing geolocation of fixed emitters from a single, airborne platform using a two-element, very long baseline interferometer (VLBI) from 10 to 100 feet in length. The interferometer baseline is precisely tracked through a differential GPS system using auxiliary antennas placed in close proximity to the VLBI pair. A lever arm correction is applied to arrive at the VLBI baseline from the GPS measurements. A batch least squares processing algorithm is presented that operates on the interferometric phase measurements directly and resolves the associated ambiguities through global search strategies. A method of eliminating receiver phase bias by performing a difference operation is shown. Simulation results and Cramer-Rao lower bounds are also presented

Keywords

Global Positioning System; airborne radar; least squares approximations; radar antennas; radiowave interferometry; receiving antennas; Cramer-Rao lower bounds; VLBI; airborne very long baseline interferometry; auxiliary antennas; batch least squares processing; differential GPS; geolocation; receiver phase bias; Aircraft; Antenna measurements; Extraterrestrial measurements; Global Positioning System; Least squares methods; Motion measurement; Noise level; Phase measurement; Radar signal processing; Radio interferometry;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Sensor Array and Multichannel Processing, 2006. Fourth IEEE Workshop on

Conference_Location

Waltham, MA

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0308-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SAM.2006.1706149

Filename

1706149