Feasibility Study of EO SARs as Opportunity Illuminators in Passive Radars: PAZ-Based Case Study

Sensors

Jose-Luis Bárcena-Humanes²  Pedro-José Gómez-Hoyo²  Maria-Pilar Jarabo-Amores¹  David Mata-Moya²  Nerea De-Rey-Maestre² 

[1] Signal Theory and Communications Department, Higher Polytechnic School, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid 28805, Spain;

关键词: passive radar;    bistatic geometry;    resolution;    opportunity illuminator;    synthetic aperture radar;    PAZ;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s151129079

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Passive radars exploit the signal transmitted by other systems, known as opportunity illuminators (OIs), instead of using their own transmitter. Due to its almost total invulnerability to natural disasters or physical attacks, satellite OIs are of special interest. In this line, a feasibility study of Earth Observation Synthetic Aperture Radar (EO SAR) systems as OIs is carried out taking into consideration signal waveform, availability, bistatic geometry, instrumented coverage area and incident power density. A case study based on the use of PAZ, the first Spanish EO SAR, is presented. PAZ transmitted waveform, operation modes, orbit characteristics and antenna and transmitter parameters are analyzed to estimate potential coverages and resolutions. The study concludes that, due to its working in on-demand operating mode, passive radars based on PAZ-type illuminators can be proposed as complementing tools during the sensor commissioning phase, for system maintenance and for improving its performance by providing additional information about the area of interest and/or increasing the data updating speed, exploiting other sensors during the time PAZ is not available.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.