Inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging of satellites

We present a scheme for radar imaging of satellites by the inverse synthetic aperture radar technique. We include some general principles in image formation when dealing with microwave-scattering experiments, such as radar observation of a satellite, so that the article is not confined to the radar community. We propose an original motion compensation algorithm for image autofocusing: This one-stage algorithm is faster than usual two-stage algorithms and turns to be quite accurate, which can be measured by quality criteria and visual inspection of reconstructed images. We show its application to imaging of the Russian space station Mir with two different radar systems. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.