A Method for the Determination of Target Aspect Angle with Respect to a Radar.

In the post Gulf War era, significant effort has been expended in the area of Non-Cooperative Target Identification (NCTI). The techniques proposed for use with radar systems all have a common feature: the need to use target aspect angle with respect to (w.r.t.) the direction of arrival of the radar signal to reduce the problem to a manageable size. This paper will present a rigorous development of the mathematics for solving this problem exactly given target position and attitude data; and then, develop the mathematics for solving this problem when only the radar's positional measurement of the target is available. Finally, data will be presented to show the practical accuracy limits of aspect angle calculations using radar data.