Assessing the Detection Performance on Icy Targets Acquired by an Orbiting Radar Sounder

Radar sounders (RS) can be used to acquire data on ice sheets and provide direct evidence of the structures in the subsurface. Many acquisitions are available from airborne RS in the Antarctica and Greenland. However, airborne data are costly, have limited spatial coverage, and nonhomogeneous characteristics. To overcome these limitations, a potential satellite-mounted RS could provide uniform coverage and consistent data quality at the cost of lower resolution and higher path loss. In this paper, we assess the performance of a possible Earth-orbiting RS by simulating and analyzing its radargrams. The simulation approach reprocesses existing airborne RS to match the orbital RS characteristics. The simulated radargrams are analyzed to estimate the losses and understand the detection performance of icy targets using state-of-the-art data analysis techniques. The preliminary analysis of the simulated radargrams indicates that, under the simplified assumptions, an orbiting RS will be capable of imaging the investigated subsurface targets.