Signal Processing Techniques for a Planetary Subsurface Radar Onboard Satellite

We are developing a satellite-borne HF ( ~ 10 MHz) radar system to be used to investigate planetary subsurface layered structures. Before deciding the design of a high-performance subsurface radar system, in this study we calculate the propagation and reflection characteristics of various HF radar pulses through subsurface layer models, in order to examine the wave forms and frequencies of the radar pulses suitable to discriminate and pick up weak subsurface echoes buried in stronger surface reflection and scattering echoes. In the numerical calculations the wave form of a transmitted radar pulse is first Fourier-transformed into a number of elementary plane waves having different frequencies, for each of which the propagation and reflection characteristics through subsurface layer models are calculated by a full wave analysis. Then the wave form of the reflected radar echo is constructed by synthesizing all of the elementary plane waves. As the transmitted pulses, we use several different types of wave form modulation to realize the radar pulse compression to improve the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio and time resolution of the subsurface echoes: the linear FM chirp (conventional), the M (maximal-length) sequence and the complementary sequences. We will discuss the characteristics of these pulse compression techniques, such as the improvement in the S/N ratio and the time resolution to identify the subsurface echoes. We will also present the possibility of applying the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) method to further improve both the S/N ratio and time resolution to extract the weaker subsurface echoes.