Multichannel Passive Radar Demonstrator Based on Starlink Satellite Signals for Persistent Bistatic SAR Inteferometry

The recent increase in the number of Earth observation satellites in Low Earth Orbits (LEO) has greatly improved the monitoring capabilities and reduced the revisit times. However, the currently deployed or planned remote sensing constellations do not guarantee the persistent imaging of local areas that is required by some emerging applications, e.g. avalanche or landslide detection. Nevertheless, this limitation could be overcome thanks to the opportunistic exploitation of the novel broadband communication LEO satellite constellations, such as Starlink, which provides global and persistent illumination of the Earth's surface. Therefore, this contribution presents the concept and passive radar system architecture for the exploitation of Starlink user-downlink signals as illumination of opportunity for persistent bistatic interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) applications with ground receivers. Besides, the developed prototype for the experimental validation of this concept and some discussion about its capabilities and challenges are presented.