Bistatic Space Borne Radar for Early Warning

The Bistatic Radar architecture, with early warning capability, has been analyzed considering the Tactical Ballistic Missiles (TBM), cruise missile and aircraft, as preferred threats. This study is addressed to analyze the requirements and a proper design of a space borne Bistatic SAR (BSAR) with the relevant performance. The bistatic solution has been considered as a preferred one due to the good immunity to potential jammer present on the theatre area, allowing also a reduced value of peak transmitter power, permitting to utilize quite all the temporal interval for the signal transmission without interruption during the receiving phase. The BSAR technique permits to increase the resolution in order discriminate closely targets. In addition this paper investigates the imaging of an isolated fast moving pointing object (MPO) and the clutter cancellation needed in presence of fixed terrain/sea background (feature expected in the realistic situation of an object moving over a terrain or over the ocean). Presented at the RTO Systems Concepts and Integration Panel (SCI) held in Colorado Springs, United States, 10-12 Oct 2005 and published in Meeting Proceedings RTO-MP-SCI-150, Paper 17. See also ADM202138, Integration of Space-Based Assets within Full Spectrum Operations (Integration des moyens spatiaux dans toute la gamme des operations. The original document contains color images.