Geosynchronous spaceborne-airborne bistatic moving target indication system: Performance analysis and configuration design

Geosynchronous spaceborne-airborne bistatic synthetic aperture radar (GEO SA-BSAR), consisting of GEO transmitter and airborne receiver, has stable coverage for a long time and benefits moving target detection. However, the performance of GEO SA-BSAR moving target indication (MTI) system varies widely between bistatic configurations. The traditional configuration design for GEO SA-BSAR system only considers the imaging performance, which may cause the poor MTI performance. In this paper, we propose a bistatic configuration design method to jointly optimize the MTI and SAR imaging performance for GEO SA-BSAR MTI system. The relationship between the MTI performance and bistatic configuration parameters is derived analytically and analyzed based on the maximum output signal to clutter and noise ratio (SCNR) criterion. Then, the MTI performance and SAR imaging performance are jointly considered to model the configuration design problem as a multi-objective optimization problem under the constrained condition. Finally, the optimal configuration for GEO SA-BSAR MTI system is given.