ISAR Imaging of a Rotating Asteroid Irradiated by Pulsar’s Electromagnetic Emission

The aim of the present study is imaging of moving objects, asteroids illuminated by continuous coherent wideband pulsar’s signals. As pulsars are located on more than thousands of light years from Earth, objects crossing pulsars’ emission beams are considered as second sources of electromagnetic waves, carrying object’s shape and velocity information that can be extracted by application pulsar emission-based inverse aperture synthesis. Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) scenario, geometry and kinematics are analytically described. Models of pulsar signals and ISAR signals secondary emitted by asteroids are developed. White Gaussian noise of high level is added to the deterministic reemitted signal in order to approach the real signal scenario. Two-Dimensional (2D) Fourier transform for image extraction is applied. Special iterative noise removing procedure is suggested for asteroid’s image enhancement. To verify mathematical model and imaging algorithms numerical experiments are carried out.