Patent ID: 8471758

Claim:
A method of terminal phase radar guidance of an airborne weapon for determining aimpoint measurements to multiple scatterers on a man-made target, comprising: transmitting an RF pulse via an antenna array at the target, a bandwidth of said RF pulse or a size of an aperture of the antenna array establishing a Rayleigh resolution as a bound for range or angle measurement resolution, respectfully; receiving and sampling at the antenna array a return pulse reflected off the multiple scatterers on the target, said antenna array coupled to a spatial array of time-sampled receiver channels to generate a data cube that spans the spatial array and sampling period, each complex value in the data cube having an amplitude and phase; setting up a system of equations x=As+n in an aimpoint computer, where each row of data measurement vector x is a measured complex value for one of the receivers, each column of measurement manifold A is a basis function parameterized by an angle or range to the target, where the number of basis functions is greater than the length of the measurement vector x, said number of basis functions determining a threshold resolution for resolving scatters on the target that exceeds the Rayleigh resolution while making the system of equations underdetermined, each row of scatterer vector s is a scattering coefficient corresponding to a particular angle or range, and n is noise; using the aimpoint computer to execute program instructions for sparse reconstruction to uniquely solve for scattering coefficients s subject to a sparsity constraint on the number of scatterers, a plurality of said scattering coefficients s having non-zero values identifying the range or angle measurements to the scatters on the target; and handing off the updated range or angles measurements for the multiple scatters to the missile's guidance computer.