Fusion of radar and satellite target measurements

Gabriel Moy; Donald Blaty; Morton Farber; Carlton Nealy

doi:10.1117/12.883523

17 May 2011 Fusion of radar and satellite target measurements

Gabriel Moy, Donald Blaty, Morton Farber, Carlton Nealy

Proceedings Volume 8044, Sensors and Systems for Space Applications IV; 804405 (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.883523
Event: SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 2011, Orlando, Florida, United States

Abstract

A potentially high payoff for the ballistic missile defense system (BMDS) is the ability to fuse the information gathered by various sensor systems. In particular, it may be valuable in the future to fuse measurements made using ground based radars with passive measurements obtained from satellite-based EO/IR sensors. This task can be challenging in a multitarget environment in view of the widely differing resolution between active ground-based radar and an observation made by a sensor at long range from a satellite platform. Additionally, each sensor system could have a residual pointing bias which has not been calibrated out. The problem is further compounded by the possibility that an EO/IR sensor may not see exactly the same set of targets as a microwave radar. In order to better understand the problems involved in performing the fusion of metric information from EO/IR satellite measurements with active microwave radar measurements, we have undertaken a study of this data fusion issue and of the associated data processing techniques. To carry out this analysis, we have made use of high fidelity simulations to model the radar observations from a missile target and the observations of the same simulated target, as gathered by a constellation of satellites. In the paper, we discuss the improvements seen in our tests when fusing the state vectors, along with the improvements in sensor bias estimation. The limitations in performance due to the differing phenomenology between IR and microwave radar are discussed as well.

Citation Download Citation

Gabriel Moy, Donald Blaty, Morton Farber, and Carlton Nealy "Fusion of radar and satellite target measurements", Proc. SPIE 8044, Sensors and Systems for Space Applications IV, 804405 (17 May 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.883523

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