A Comprehensive Framework For End-to-End Radar Sounder Data Simulation And Processing In Planetary Missions

Planetary radar sounders are key instruments for the investigation of subsurface struc￾tures on planetary bodies, providing unique insights into geological stratigraphy, buried interfaces, and compositional variations. Their scientific return, however, strongly de￾pends on the complex interaction between instrument design, acquisition geometry, en￾vironmental properties, and data processing strategies. Despite their relevance, existing workflows for planetary radar sounding often rely on fragmented tools that separately address acquisition planning, signal simulation, and data analysis, lacking a unified and traceable framework capable of consistently linking these stages. This thesis presents the development of a modular, automated, and end-to-end simu￾lation framework for planetary radar sounders, designed to support both pre-acquisition performance assessment and post-acquisition data interpretation. The proposed frame￾work connects all stages of the radar observation chain, from scenario modelling and acquisition planning to coherent signal simulation, telemetry generation, and low-level data processing, ensuring full consistency with instrument-specific architectures, oper￾ational constraints, and mission flight rules. A central innovation of this work is the direct integration of acquisition parameters, environmental and dielectric properties, and radar performance metrics within a single simulation pipeline, enabling systematic and reproducible investigations of radar observability under mission-relevant conditions. The framework incorporates realistic geological scenario modelling, including both simplified and complex stratified media derived from digital elevation models and analog geological structures. Radar signal simulation is performed using a coherent multilayer simulator, extended to reproduce the exact telemetry formats of the target instruments, allowing simulated data to be processed by the same pipelines used for flight operations. Additional realism is achieved through the inclusion of instrument-specific noise sources and antenna responses, either derived from measured data or expected performance mod￾els. A dedicated radar sounder emulator is developed to reproduce the functional behavior of the instrument reception chain, emulating both hardware- and software-level opera￾tions without performing a full physical simulation of the underlying components. The emulator models antenna response, noise contributions, signal attenuation, digitization, and onboard processing, producing science telemetry products fully consistent with those generated by the flight instrument. This approach enables a direct and reliable link between theoretical signal modelling and mission data products. The proposed system is complemented by the design and validation of a low-level data processing chain, including the tm2raw pipeline for converting telemetry into PDS4- compliant raw data products, and a fully automated quick-look analysis framework. The latter introduces a set of quantitative and qualitative performance metrics to assess in￾strument behavior, signal quality, and operational conditions during radar acquisitions. The framework has been developed and validated in the context of two ESA planetary missions: the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) instrument onboard JUICE and the Subsurface Radar Sounder (SRS) onboard EnVision. RIME data were used to vali￾date processing chains using both simulated and real in-flight measurements, while SRS simulations were employed to analyze radar performance over representative Venusian geological scenarios, including lava flows and tesserae terrains. Overall, this thesis provides a comprehensive and extensible environment that bridges the gap between radar acquisition definition and data interpretation, offering a robust tool for instrument performance assessment, observation strategy optimization, and sci￾entific analysis in current and future planetary radar sounding missions.