A parametric high resolution range profile compensation method for space targets

Space targets usually orbit with high speed a certain level of acceleration, which makes the dechirped return signal be a multi-component signal with polynomial phase. Since the high order phases will distort the high resolution range profiles, the process of motion compensation is necessary before pulse compression. Otherwise, one can not get the correct high resolution range profiles. In this paper, a parametric model based on range measurements is proposed to compensate the distortion of range profiles. According to the motion characteristics of space target, a parametric model of the ranging element is established. Wih the application of the ranging information obtained by the wideband and narrowband signals, an objective function based on the entropy of the average range profile is minimized to estimate the parameters in the established model, with which the distortion of range profile is well compensated. Simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.