KEYWORDS: Magnetoencephalography, Mars, Radar, Visualization, Analog electronics, Data acquisition, Device simulation, Interfaces, Attenuators, Digital signal processing
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, MRO, scheduled for launch in 2005, will be equipped with a sounder to find subsurface water and ice: Shallow Radar, SHARAD. This radar has been developed by Alenia Spazio and funded by Italian Space Agency, ASI.
An integral part of such kind missions is the development of an EGSE (Electrical Ground Support Equipment) capable to test all the radar functionalities.
CORISTA has been responsible to define the EGSE technical requirements and to design, build and test the Mars Echoes Generation System (MEGS).
This paper describes the activities developed and the results obtained during the test campaigns of SHARAD. An architectural description of the MEGS will be given with emphasis on the technical aspects related to the signal generation of Mars Echoes and possible operating modes.
Giovanni Alberti, Luigi Citarella, Luca Ciofaniello, Roberto Fusco, Giovanni Galiero, Aurelio Minoliti, Antonio Moccia, Marco Sacchettino, Giuseppe Salzillo
MINISAR is a compact airborne interferometric SAR potentially suitable for many applications but mainly finalized for the production of technical topographic maps and monitoring the evolution of landslides events and assessing their extension and risk area. The program is co-funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, Universities and Research (M.I.U.R.)
The hardware consists in an airborne X-band radar, able to obtain a resolution less than a meter (because of a 280 MHz stepped chirp signal) and an altimetric accuracy less than 7 meters. Such an accuracy derives from an equivalent 1.5 meters baseline and the high gain antennas that let MINISAR to use a transmitted power of only 80 W. The system will be mounted on board of a small platform and it is thought to have future development for unmanned platform.
Data will be processed using a chirp scaling algorithm in order to obtain the two Single Look Complex (SLC) images which can be then processed to obtain high accuracy Digital Elevation Model (DEM).
In the framework of ARCHEO, a national research project funded by the Italian Ministry for Universities and Scientific and Technological Research (M.U.R.S.T.), a new ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been developed by the Italian Consortium for Research on Advanced Remote Sensing Systems (CO.RI.S.T.A.). The system has been specially designed to meet archaeological requirements and it will be tested the two archaeological sites of Sinuessa and Cales, in the Southern Italy. An innovative feature of ARCHEO concerns the exploitation of that of a multiview multistatic measurement scheme (at several frequencies) rather than a more common multimonostatic (or multibistatic). In order to reconstruct buried objects starting from the measurement data collected with such an acquisition strategy, it is made use of an inverse scattering technique. With the real project ARCHEO in mind (in particular this scheme of measurement), this paper deals with a theoretical discussion on the features of the class of retrievable profiles by G.P.R. data, within the framework of a linear model for electromagnetic scattering in a two dimensional lossless half space. For a given range of frequencies exploitable, multiview multistatic measurements can be useful in G.P.R. prospecting because they can provide information on low spatial harmonic components of an unknown object not attainable from the multimonostatic scheme exploiting the same frequency range. In particular, we show that, for a given band of work frequencies, the class of the unknowns retrievable by a multiview multistatic multifrequency measurement configuration can be is not much different from that attainable within a multimonostatic configuration with the addition of multiview multistatic data taken at the lowest of the frequencies adopted.
KEYWORDS: Antennas, General packet radio service, Radar, Electromagnetism, Sensing systems, Dielectrics, Electronic filtering, Remote sensing, Scientific research, Signal to noise ratio
In the framework of ARCHEO, a national research project funded by the Italian Ministry for Universities and Scientific and Technological Research, a new ground penetrating radar has been developed by the Italian Consortium for Research on Advanced Remote Sensing Systems. The system has been specially designed to meet archaeological requirements and it will be used to identify and characterize buried finds. The paper summarizes the main guidelines followed during the design phase and presents the radar architecture.
KEYWORDS: Antennas, Signal to noise ratio, Interferometry, Radar, Backscatter, Doppler effect, Signal attenuation, Data processing, Satellites, Synthetic aperture radar
This paper briefly overviews the status of the research in the development of new altimeter systems presently carried out in Alenia Spazio S.p.A. in the frame of internal research activities and ESA feasibility study contracts. In particular, the concepts of synthetic aperture and interferometric altimetry or global ice/land topography are reviewed in this paper. These system designs are extremely promising, since they can overcome the limitations of the classic nadir-looking pulse limited systems. Conventional system in fact, in spite of the extremely high range accuracy achievable over oceans, are unable to provide topographic details over ice or land due to their coarse horizontal resolution, several hundreds od meters against the 100-300 m required in ice/land topography applications.
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