Absolute attitude from monostatic radar measurements of rotating objects

The Tracking and Imaging Radar (TIRA) System is used to determine orbits and to generate Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) images of satellites. In certain situations such as damage analysis, a satellite to be observed is not stabilized, and its attitude is not known in advance. In order to assess the situation, the intrinsic motion is important to know. In this paper, several algorithms are derived and tested which estimate a constant rotational motion from 3-D features obtained from 2-D ISAR images by a modified stereo vision algorithm.