Passive Synthetic Aperture High-Precision Radiation Source Location by Single Satellite

Abstract

Passive localization is important because of its strong concealment and long detection distance. Space-borne passive radiation source location technologies have contradicting characteristics of wide coverage and high-precision position. Hence, accurate target identification is difficult to realize. A novel measurement that utilizes passive synthetic aperture is presented in this letter to measure the time of the satellite’s passing zenith precisely. In the beam coverage duration, the radiation carrier Doppler component is extracted and accumulated to synthesize an equivalent large virtual satellite antenna azimuth aperture. Taking advantage of the linear Doppler rate, a local matched filter is designed to implement a 2-D search. Doppler rate and zero Doppler point correspond to the target range and azimuth locations, respectively. The corresponding subastral point position radiation source can then be determined. Practical experiment results from an unmanned aerial vehicle platform demonstrated the effectiveness, wide coverage, and high-precision meter scale of the proposed method. Satellite data were also utilized to verify the feasibility of the system.