Polarisation variation of linear polarised Bi‐ISAR system in space targets imaging

Abstract

A bistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (Bi-ISAR) system is used to observe space targets through different viewing angles via a bistatic radar configuration. It is seen that the receiver of a linear polarised Bi-ISAR system with a long baseline will encounter energy variation and high-order phase deviation in ISAR imaging due to the polarisation variation of this system. Here, the authors quantitatively analyse the energy variation caused by polarisation mismatch in a linearly polarised Bi-ISAR system by investigating the time-varying bistatic angle and intrinsic variable polarisation effect of targets via the combination of observation geometry and computational electromagnetic. The high-order phase deviation in long-term coherent processing is also presented through the same strategy. The authors conducted simulations for a bistatic system, which is configured with different baseline vectors, to analyse the impact of polarisation variation of the linear polarised Bi-ISAR system on the energy loss and high-order phase terms.