Ensuring space environment security through the detection of space debris and non-cooperative threat objects has become a critical mission for next-generation spaceborne surveillance systems. Frequency diversity array (FDA) radar, with its unique range angle-dependent beampattern, offers a transformative capability to distinguish closely-spaced space threats from intense background clutter. However, the operational deployment of spaceborne FDA is inherently hindered by stringent platform resource constraints, including limited power supply, high hardware complexity, and restricted data transmission bandwidth. These physical limitations inevitably lead to incomplete signal observations, resulting in elevated sidelobes that can obscure small, high-speed space debris. To bridge the gap between hardware constraints and high-fidelity surveillance, this paper proposes an AI-enabled data recovery framework based on deep matrix factorization. Specifically designed to process the complex-valued nature of radar echoes, the proposed framework introduces two specialized architectures: a real-valued representation-based method (DMF-Rr) and a native complex-valued deep matrix factorization (CDMF) network that preserves vital phase coherence. By leveraging deep learning to “enable” sparse-sampled systems, the proposed method effectively reconstructs missing observations without requiring prior knowledge of the signal rank. Numerical results demonstrate that the AI-powered CDMF significantly suppresses the high sidelobes induced by resource-limited sampling, enabling the reliable identification and localization of weak threat objects. This study demonstrates the power of AI in overcoming the physical bottlenecks of spaceborne hardware, providing a robust solution for enhancing space situational awareness in an increasingly crowded orbital environment.
We study the problem of representing a discrete tensor that comes from finite uniform samplings of a multi-dimensional and multiband analog signal. Particularly, we consider two typical cases in which the shape of the subbands is cubic or parallelepipedic. For the cubic case, by examining the spectrum of its corresponding time- and band-limited operators, we obtain a low-dimensional optimal dictionary to represent the original tensor. We further prove that the optimal dictionary can be approximated by the famous \ac{dpss} with certain modulation, leading to an efficient constructing method. For the parallelepipedic case, we show that there also exists a low-dimensional dictionary to represent the original tensor. We present rigorous proof that the numbers of atoms in both dictionaries are approximately equal to the dot of the total number of samplings and the total volume of the subbands. Our derivations are mainly focused on the \ac{2d} scenarios but can be naturally extended to high dimensions.
We consider high angular resolution detection using distributed mobile platforms implemented with so-called partly calibrated arrays, where position errors between subarrays exist and the counterparts within each subarray are ideally calibrated. Since position errors between antenna arrays affect the coherent processing of measurements from these arrays, it is commonly believed that its angular resolution is influenced. A key question is whether and how much the angular resolution of partly calibrated arrays is affected by the position errors, in comparison with ideally calibrated arrays. To address this fundamental problem, we theoretically illustrate that partly calibrated arrays approximately achieve high angular resolution. Our analysis uses a special characteristic of Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) w.r.t. the source separation: When the source separation increases, the CRB first declines rapidly, then plateaus out, and the turning point is close to the angular resolution limit. This means that the turning point of CRB can be used to indicate angular resolution. We then theoretically analyze the declining and plateau phases of CRB, and explain that the turning point of CRB in partly calibrated arrays is close to the angular resolution limit of distributed arrays without errors, demonstrating high resolution ability. This work thus provides a theoretical guarantee for the high-resolution performance of distributed antenna arrays in mobile platforms.