[mturmon]

I know something about SAR and InSAR because I use radar (Earth) remote sensing in my day job, and I have a signal processing background. But I’m not a serious radar expert.

ISAR sounds like its operating principle is the same as the radar imaging technique used for these asteroid results. In general, it’s all radar imaging so you get reflectances in delay/Doppler coordinates as your observable.

One possible difference is the poor SNR of the asteroid problem — you have to average many radar images to beat down the noise. The velocity of the scattering elements on the asteroid is assumed to be the same across all these images (as far as I know). (After correcting for a known offset due to the Earth’s changing motion.)

This seems to be a little different than the ISAR “swaying boat” type of application in which the body is indeed accelerating and your radar image must be adjusted for that, or else the mast of the swaying boat will smear across the image.

It may also be worth saying that there is no synthetic aperture in the OP - it’s a physical aperture.