Challenges to Airborne and Orbital Radar Sounding in the Presence of Surface Clutter: Lessons Learned (so far) from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica

Details Challenges to Airborne and Orbital Radar Sounding in the Presence of Surface Clutter: Lessons Learned (so far) from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica Challenges to Airborne and Orbital Radar Sounding in the Presence of Surface Clutter: Lessons Learned (so far) from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agufm.p31c0213h&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #P31C-0213

Computer Science

Sound

0694 Instruments And Techniques, 0720 Glaciers, 6225 Mars, 9310 Antarctica (4207)

Scientific paper

The search for life and in-situ resources for exploration on Mars targets both liquid and solid water, whether distributed or in reservoirs. Massive surface ice may cover potential habitats or other features of great interest. Ice-rich layering in the high latitudes holds clues to the climatic history of the planet. Multiple geophysical methods will clearly be necessary to fully characterize these various states of water (and other forms of ice), but radar sounding will be a critical component of the effort. Orbital radar sounders are already being employed and plans for surface-based and suborbital, above-surface radar sounders are being discussed. The difficulties in interpreting data from each type of platform are quite different. Given the lack of existing orbital radar sounding data from any planetary body, the analysis of airborne radar sounding data is quite useful for assessing the advantages and disadvantages of above-surface radar sounding on Mars. In addition to over 300,000 line-km of data collected over the Antarctic ice sheet by airborne radar sounding, we have recently analyzed data from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica where conditions and features emulate Mars in several respects. These airborne radar sounding data were collected over an ice-free area of Taylor Valley, ice-covered lakes, Taylor Glacier, and Beacon Valley. The pulsed radar (52.5 - 67.5 MHz chirp) was coherently recorded. Pulse compression and unfocused SAR processing were applied. One of the most challenging aspects of above-surface radar sounding is the determination of echo sources. This can, of course, be problematic for surface-based radar sounders given possible subsurface scattering geometries, but it is most severe for above-surface sounders because echoes from cross-track surface topography (surface clutter) can have similar time delays to those from the subsurface. We have developed two techniques to accomplish the identification of this surface clutter in single-pass airborne radar sounding data. The first technique simulates radar data using a digital elevation model (DEM) of surface topography to predict the location and shape of surface echoes in the radar data. This is complemented by the cross-track migration of radar echoes onto the surface. These migrated echoes are superimposed on imagery in order to correlate them with potential surface sources. Using these techniques enabled us to identify a number of echoes in a 24-km segment of the Dry Valleys flight path as arising from the surface and to identify subsurface echoes under the main trunk of Taylor Glacier and possibly multiple reflectors beneath the toe of Taylor Glacier. Surface-based radar confirms the thickness of the glacier at three crossing points. In the ice-free section of the test segment no real subsurface reflectors were found, indicating that the electromagnetic properties of the ground there do not allow significant radar penetration at 60 MHz and/or no radar-significant subsurface interfaces exist. These results illustrate the importance of using complementary techniques, the usefulness of a DEM, and the limitations of single-pass radar sounding data. Advanced processing techniques utilizing radar phase information show promise for achieving better clutter removal for single-pass data. Multi-pass data that we recently collected in the Dry Valleys should allow for the development of techniques to reduce or eliminate the need for a surface elevation model.

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