Space debris narrowband imaging via general radon transform in reassigned spectrogram

Abstract

Space debris is a serious environmental problem in space, because its high speed will cause potential collision risk and bring on destructive disaster to operational spacecrafts. Since the size of debris is directly related to the impact of collision, shape estimation is an important task in the observation of space debris. Imaging with narrowband radar is an available technical approach to extract the dimensional and structural feature of the space debris. However, in actual application the image resolution can not meet the ideal condition of half radar wavelength with the restriction of time-frequency analysis or endure the interference of side lobe peaks with the coherent integral processing. To obtain a more focused image of the space debris, a method based on general Radon transform in reassigned spectrogram is proposed. This approach could gain higher resolution without introducing side lobe peaks. The simulation result verifies the validity of this algorithm. (5 pages)