A novel emitter localization method using an interferometer on a spin-stabilized satellite

The conventional line-of-sight (LOS) geo-location method using two-dimension interferometer on a satellite leads to heavy payloads and it is always affected by amplitude-phase inconsistencies among receiving channels. A novel passive localization method is proposed, which only needs two receiving channels to form an interferometer on a spin-stabilized satellite. The rate of phase difference change is measured for emitter localization in this method. The equipments mounted on the satellite can be cut down greatly and localization performance is not sensitive to amplitude-phase inconsistency between the two receiving channels as well as the localization is fast and accurate by this method. The Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is presented. Numerical results indicated that the localization performance will be better if the rotating plane of the interferometer is perpendicular to the satellite position vector at the initial moment and it can be improved by increasing rotating speed of the interferometer. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) was introduced as a location algorithm. Simulation results under typical scenario indicated that localization accuracy of PSO algorithm can approach CRLB.