Inverse synthetic aperture radar range profile compensation of plasma-sheath-enveloped reentry object

The scattering points in a plasma sheath characterized with coupled velocities can cause pulse compression mismatching, which results in displacement and energy diffusion in the one-dimension range profile. To solve this problem, we deduce the echo model of the plasma-sheath-enveloped reentry object. By estimating the coupled velocities, we propose a compensation method to correct the defocus of an inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image in range dimension to improve the quality of the ISAR images. The simulation results suggest that the echoes from different regions of the surface of the reentry object have various coupling velocities, and the higher the coupled velocity, the more serious the displacement and energy diffusion in the range dimension. Our proposed method can correct the range dimension aberration. Two measurement metrics were used to evaluate the improvement of the compensation method.