Space Based Radar (SBR) Space Time Adaptive Processing (STAP)

Space base radar (SBR) by virtue of its location can cover a very large area on Earth for surveillance and monitoring of ground moving targets. This proposal addresses the analysis of SBR concepts including main beam and side lobe clutter modeling, range-Doppler analysis and radar waveform selection. Design of innovative Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) algorithms to improve target detection and performance evaluation of these algorithms on SBR clutter data are proposed here. Other innovations include analysis of grazing angle correction factor, Earth's rotation modeling as crab angle and crab magnitude and multi-static STAP using a cluster of satellites. Determination of the Cramer-Rao bound for minimum detectable velocity of targets buried in clutter as a function of radar parameters will form part of proposed Phase II efforts. Two state of the art user friendly software toolboxes will be developed during this program: (i) an SBR clutter simulation toolbox containing realistic modeling tools to synthesize clutter data; (ii) an SBR software toolbox incorporating a variety of modified STAP algorithms to analyze SBR data with provisions to include experimental data. A user manual and a detailed tutorial on SBR and STAP also will be developed as part of this project.