Performance Evaluation of a Distributed Radar System for Space Surveillance

Distributed radar systems are attractive for space surveillance because they enable an improvement in network performance through improved coverage and multiple observation perspectives. This paper presents a performance evaluation of a number of practical distributed radar aspects for a space surveillance application. A concept of pulse chasing for a bistatic configuration with long baseline is presented and the requirement on the number of simultaneous receive beams is analyzed. Additionally, the influence of synchronization errors on the overall measurement accuracy is investigated and examples of the detectability gain through multiple signal paths is presented. These results confirm the feasibility of distributed radar concept for space surveillance.