Mars express mission: A MARSIS radar signal simulation

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Scientific paper

About Mars exploration program, a question which is raised today is to know if a part of the quantity of water that has been present on Mars may be found in the Martian underground, as liquid water or ice, and, if the answer to this question is positive, to know what volume of water is present there, and where it is. To answer to both these interrogations, in 2003, the Mars Express Mission will carry a spaceborne radar sounder equipment called Marsis, for "Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding", in order to map Martian subsurface dielectric characteristics. This radar is based on an altimeter geometry (nadir looking configuration). Even thought that such a radar signal contains both surface and deep echoes, the main part of the signal we are interested in is the reflected signal from underground layers. This signal, due to its propagation in the absorbing underground media, is much less energetic than the surface echoes. We are going to present here a radar sounding simulation which could be used to validate the radar echoes processing and to support the interpretation of the future Marsis data. In order to follow the Marsis radar sounding process scheme, the first step in the building of our simulation was to model the Martian surface. Many surface modelisation methods have been developed and can be found in the literature, but considering the fact Martian surface is mostly smooth, the modelisation algorithm we developed uses the Facet Method scheme. We will show that this method is a valuable process to model a smooth surface. This method is a very fast one, the computation time it takes is short comparatively to other methods. We will discuss the implementation of the algorithm and show results. Then this surface model allowed us to simulate the global radar echoes. We will present results of simulations using the model of Martian surface and adding some subsurface structures. The instrument simulation we defined makes strict reference to the Marsis radar settings, anyway it may model any SAR radar with a nadir looking configuration.

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