Solving Velocity Ambiguity for Pulse Doppler Radar Space Target Measurement

In order to solve the problem of severe velocity ambiguity for pulse Doppler radar high-speed space orbital targets measurement, a new velocity ambiguity resolution method based on the short arc orbit determination technique is presented in this paper. By means of a modified orbit determination model, this method can adopt the original radar measurements with the range-Doppler coupling term directly. It uses the numerical integration method to solve the differential equation of the state transition matrix and corrects the range-Doppler coupling term simultaneously, and then the optimal reference orbit is obtained by using the iterative least squares method. Finally, the velocity ambiguity is determined with the accurate reference velocity which can be calculated from the above reference orbit. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can estimate the reference velocity accurately and satisfies the performance requirement of velocity ambiguity resolution.