Performance analysis of ground-based long baseline radar distributed systems for space situational awareness

Detection of space objects is a key component of space situational awareness, which could help prevent and minimise space collisions. While there have been lots of radar systems designed to detect space objects, few of them have dealt with long baseline distributed bistatic pairs. The authors focus on the feasibility of long baseline bistatic radars, which can be extended for the multistatic case; and the performance of the multistatic system for a target at different altitudes assuming one transmitter over three different scenarios: a cluster of receivers, receivers spread throughout the world and the combination of the two previous cases. To analyse the performance the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) ambiguity function (AF) will be employed. The results of the MIMO AF show how the fusion of different bistatic pairs improves the detection capabilities. Moreover, when the different radar measurements are coherently summed in the MIMO AF, the uncertainty on the location of the target is reduced.