Moving target performance for RADARSAT-2

The RADARSAT-2 design allows two portions of the full antenna aperture to be used independently with two separate receivers. By appropriate processing of the received echo data from the two apertures, it is possible to detect targets with non-zero radial velocities. Furthermore, the radial velocities of these targets can be estimated. Under contract to the Canadian Space Agency and in cooperation with the Canadian Department of National Defence, MDA will include an experimental ground-moving-target detection capability in RADARSAT-2. This addition to the RADARSAT-2 design is known as the Moving Object Detection Experiment (MODEX). One type of processing that will be performed as part of MODEX is along-track interferometry (ATI). ATI processing consists of processing the data from each aperture into complex SAR images, and then computing the interferogram of the two images. The resulting detection performance depends on the target RCS, the target area, the system noise, and the background clutter. In this paper, the result of an analysis of the predicted performance of RADARSAT-2's MODEX as a function of these and other parameters is given.