MIMO Radar-Based Rotation Parameter Estimation of Non-Cooperative Space Debris Objects

This paper presents an approach to determine the rotation parameters of a non-cooperative space debris object by extracting, localizing and tracking the target's dominant scatterers with a millimeter-wave MIMO radar system. An unscented Kalman filter tracks the scatterer positions over several processing intervals and is therefore able to estimate the rotation period of the target as well as the position and orientation of its rotation axis. On the one hand, the proposed algorithm is validated by realistic simulations. On the other hand, the filter performance under different rotation parameters is evaluated by different measurements in the laboratory.