SISAR imaging for space debris based on nanosatellites

The increasing amount of space debris poses a growing challenge in the development of space travel. In previous work, a proposed system comprising of a low budget space-borne passive radar based on CubeSAT, flying in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), demonstrated promising results in terms of space debris detection performance. In this work, a novel shadow inverse synthetic aperture radar (SISAR) model for space debris imaging based on nanosatellite is presented. An analysis of the received forward scattering signal is provided along with a novel model for moving transmitters and receivers SISAR imaging. Using simulated data and assuming different scenarios, the performance of the new algorithm is assessed; wherein, a classification scheme is applied using the output of the SISAR algorithm for classification between simple target shapes.