A SMALL-SAT BASED DISTRIBUTED RADAR FOR PARASITIC REMOTE SENSING

An innovative mission concept relying on a sparse aperture radar is presented. The receiving-only antenna is distributed on a formation of small satellites orbiting the Earth below independent spaceborne transmitters and exploits their signal to realize a parasitic remote sensing. Therefore, it can be reconfigured and operated at different frequencies depending on the illuminator it intends to parasitize. In this paper, both mission feasibility and preliminary radar performance are assessed by considering a scenario that accounts for a single LEO transmitter and a very LEO receiver as representative of the fractionated passive antenna