LAUSR

Abstract. Inspired by the idea of multiantenna interferometric processing in interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar, based on monostatic low-resolution narrowband radar with three antennas, a three-dimensional (3-D) interferometric imaging and micromotion feature extraction method for spinning space debris is proposed. First, the micromotion characteristic of the target in low-resolution radar is explained. Next, by taking advantage of the target’s micro-Doppler characteristic on time-frequency (TF) domain, the time-varying two-dimensional imaging of scatterers in both the normal mode and the squint mode is achieved through interferometric processing. Finally, the height information of scatterers is solved by an ellipse fitting-based method; thus 3-D imaging for the spinning space debris is realized. Meanwhile, some 3-D micromotion features are exactly extracted during imaging, and the relevant issues, including window width determination of TF analysis, scatterer separation, and noise suppression are discussed in detail. Simulation results in diverse occasions validate the effectiveness and the robustness of the method.