Ricerc@Sapienza

The exploitation of existing satellite transmissions for passive bistatic radar applications is now an emerging area due to well-known advantages as global coverage, reliability of the transmission, availability of multiple sources and existing information on signal characteristics. For these reasons space-based transmitters as illuminators of opportunity are of special appealing for maritime and air surveillance applications. The considered satellites were originally built for other purpose, therefore the power budget is suitable for telecommunication applications but it is very low for radar application. To overcome such limitation, the proposed activity has the main goal of studying and developing innovative techniques specifically tailored for the system under consideration able to detect, extract feature and estimate the kinematic parameters for maritime and aerial targets. Among the enormous set of orbiting systems: (i) Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is exploited for the maritime targets detection and (ii) geostationary satellites are used for air targets. In particular, to overcome the problem of low power density with regard to the first point a processing technique able to integrate over long time intervals is proposed, meanwhile for the second point the forward scattering concept is investigated.