Advanced Methods for Generating and Processing Simulated Radar Sounder Data for Planetary Missions

Radar sounders (RS) are active instruments that have proved to be able to profile the subsurface of planetary bodies. The design of RS instruments, as well as the interpretation of the acquired data, is a non-trivial task due to the complexity of the scenario of acquisition and the limited amount of information on the targets (especially in planetary exploration). In this context, data simulations are necessary to support the design of the radar, the development of the related processing chain, and the definition of algorithms for the automatic analysis of data. However, state-of-the-art RS simulation methods are characterized by different trade-offs between simulation accuracy and computational costs. On the one hand, numerical methods, such as the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) technique, allow to accurately model the wave-target interaction by exactly solving Maxwell's equations at the cost of very high computational requirements. On the other hand, optical methods, such as the ray-tracing based Multi-layer Coherent Simulator (MCS), rely on approximated solution of Maxwell's equations that allow for a better usage of computational resources at the cost of a less accurate modeling. Moreover, simulators produce raw or range-compressed only data, making it difficult to interpret and analyze them via direct comparison with the real data, which are typically processed also for azimuth compression. In this thesis, we present four main contributions related to the simulation of RS data to address the above-mentioned limitations. The first and second contributions thus present 3D simulations of selected targets of two new RS instruments, i.e., the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) and the EnVision Subsurface Radar Sounder (SRS). The simulations are performed with the FDTD and MCS simulators. Despite producing good results in terms of detection probability of the selected targets, these two contributions highlight the above-mentioned gaps in the literature of simulation of RS data. The first main limitation is the lack of methods that can accurately model both large and small-scale scattering phenomena at relatively low computational costs. This problem is addressed by the third contribution of this thesis, which presents a novel integrated simulation technique that models both large and small-scale surface scattering phenomena by combining the advantages of the FDTD and MCS techniques, in an accurate and computationally efficient way. The second problem identified is the lack of SAR processing techniques to be applied to the simulated radargrams. This is addressed in the fourth contribution which presents a range-Doppler method for focusing raw radar sounder data simulated with 3D coherent electromagnetic simulators. The method is general and can be applied to any electromagnetic simulator, and is demonstrated for both the FDTD and MCS methods. The results presented throughout the thesis indicate that the proposed methods advance the state-of-the-art of techniques for both generating and processing simulated RS data.