Characterisation of Resident Space Objects and Synchronisation Error Compensation in Multistatic Interferometric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging

ABSTRACT This article presents a study on interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) for three‐dimensional imaging and rotational velocity estimation. The study focuses on synchronisation error compensation in a multistatic setup with three ground‐based radars and non‐orthogonal baselines. The simulation involves CAD models of non‐cooperative targets in Keplerian orbits with different orbital parameters, and radar backscattering along the orbit is simulated based on physical optics approximation. The paper also illustrates the signal processing chain for synchronisation error compensation and the generation of interferometric pointclouds for the resident space object models in orbit. The study includes multilabel classification and performance analysis of synchronisation error compensation at varying SNR using Monte Carlo simulations. The interferometric reconstruction and classification accuracy at low SNR conditions is enhanced using multiple receiver or multi channel fusion and the performance of the fusion algorithm is evaluated at varying noise correlation between the fused channels or receivers.