Innovative Synthetic Aperture Radar/Ground Moving Target Indicator (SAR/GMTI) for Hypersonic Air Vehicles

ABSTRACT:This proposal addresses the problem of ground moving target detection and geolocation using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) from a hypersonic air platform. Combining SAR, Along-track Interferometry (ATI) and Space Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) can often yield accurate target geolocations. In a high speed environment, the pulse repetition frequency(PRF) requirements for SAR and GMTI are different, and the PRF is often limited by the desired range coverage. During the proposed effort, C&P Technologies (C&P) plans to analyze the system parameters selection to meet the operation requirement of the hypersonic air vehicle. In such situations, traditional clutter cancellation techniques that rely on stationarity are not very effective, and a new approach is necessary for detecting and geolocating moving targets in realistic clutter such as high RCS buildings and nonstationary environments. A two tier processing strategy is proposed here with signal processing for clutter minimization and moving target detection followed by exploiting available spatio-temporal priori information for false target elimination. C&P proposes to investigate specific challenges introduced by hypersonic platforms such as clutter Doppler foldover due to high platform velocity, high grazing angle that exposes higher amounts of ground clutter, limited field of view due to high speed and low altitude.BENEFIT:The proposed technologies can offer improvement for commercial sensor developers and system integrators for hypersonic air vehicles in terms of target detection, identification and discrimination. The proposed Phase I efforts will offer the necessary key algorithms/methods for integration of the proposed algorithms into current high speed airborne radar systems. Military applications of the proposed research include improved detection and identification of moving targets from high speed air vehicles including space based radars. Commercial applications include improved the current radar system performance for border patrol, drug traffic monitoring, perimeter surveillance and air traffic control applications.