Potential Marine Moving Target Indication (MMTI) Performance of the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM)

Abstract:
Recent research at DRDC Ottawa shows that Ground MTI (GMTI) is feasible with RCM, providing useful motion information, particularly for ship detection. Proposals to add a hardware switch (as on RADARSAT-2), which would require little engineering effort, have been aborted due to mission schedule impact concerns. Alternative techniques are proposed and theoretically analyzed that use only the programming flexibility of the satellites. These provide somewhat reduced MTI capability compared with the hardware solution, but there are benefits for specific applications where these methods turn out to be superior to the conventional SAR image-based techniques.