Mitigation of Radar Clutter Using Algorithmic Techniques

The Nation has made substantial investments in new and unprecedented radar systems for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) segment of the missile defense mission. Such GMD radars can achieve record breaking power-aperture products required for long range detection and tracking of potentially weak targets. The aforementioned capabilities arise from the requirement to: “detect, track and identify each and every potential object of significance in the target missile complex”. New advanced signal processing and adaptive waveform design and synthesis techniques developed by researchers at C&P Technologies have afforded a unique opportunity to further enhance the MDA radar performance without any modifications to existing radar hardware. Instead, these methods leverage the investments already made by MDA in real-time DSP and digital waveform generation. In particular, the payoffs from the proposed Phase II work will include a new real-time adaptive pulse compression technique that can extract very weak target signals that are masked by stronger nearby objects and which cannot be detected with conventional pulse compression methods. Further, innovative real-time joint transmit and adaptive receiver techniques that provide even further detection sensitivity, and resolution capabilities beyond what adaptive pulse compression alone can achieve.