The integrated processing of ionosphere and space debris for Incoherent Scattering radar

Abstract

Incoherent scatter radar (ISR) is the most comprehensive ground-based technique for studying the ionosphere, which can also be used to observe and investigate the space objects (such as space debris, etc.). Compared with the space debris, the ionosphere is a typical soft target, and the echoes from ionosphere are extremely week. The ionosphere scattering signal will be hidden under the strong echoes of ISR of space debris. In this paper, we propose the integrated processing of ionosphere and space debris simultaneously. First, the order statistics filter is proposed to detect the space debris. Then if the debris exists, the matched filtering method is used to estimate some important parameters of debris, such as range, Doppler frequency, radial velocity. Based on these parameters, we remove the space debris from the incoherent scatter results. Experiments on simulation signal and real echoes from Qujing ISR demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.