STAP analysis using multi-channel airborne radar data from flight trials

Flight trials have been performed within the NORA program in order to acquire multi-channel clutter data for different types of terrain, terrain scattered interference, and SAR data. The acquisition of clutter and terrain scattered interference has been made in order to prepare a database for future development of operational space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithms applicable to active electrically scanned antenna (AESA) systems employing multiple sub-aperture configurations. In this paper we show some preliminary results that illuminate the benefit of using all four dimensions of multi-channel radar data in a clutter rejection perspective. To illustrate the behavior of multi-channel clutter we employ spatial spectrum estimation methods such as Fourier and MUSIC. We also demonstrate post-Doppler STAP results for the air-to-air case. The results are very promising and indicate that multi-channel processing will indeed enhance the ability to detect targets obscured by clutter.