Approach for Modeling Coherent Radar Ground Echoes in Planetary Landing Simulations

摘要

An approach is proposed for modeling coherent radar echoes from a distributed ground surface in planetary landing simulations. Such simulations pose unique challenges for radar echo modeling given the highly dynamic position and attitude profile that a landing vehicle may follow. The current surface-modeling approach is based on a coherent facet model, with speckle realizations for each cell interpolated from a two-dimensional array of random values, the indices into which are computed from the viewing geometry following the Van Cittert-Zernike theorem. This formulation allows the use of methods for resampling the scene while preserving the continuity of the speckle in the modeled radar echoes. Simulated results are presented, demonstrating that the current approach indeed captures the desired surface correlation properties for use in high-fidelity models of landing radar performance.