Venus Radar Mapper (VRM): Multimode Radar System Design

William T. K. Johnson; Alvin T. Edgerton

doi:10.1117/12.951926

1 May 1986 Venus Radar Mapper (VRM): Multimode Radar System Design

William T. K. Johnson, Alvin T. Edgerton

Proceedings Volume 0589, Instrumentation for Optical Remote Sensing from Space; (1986) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.951926
Event: 1985 International Technical Symposium/Europe, 1985, Cannes, France

Abstract

The surface of Venus has remained a relative mystery because of the very dense atmosphere that is opaque to visible radiation and, thus, normal photographic techniques used to explore the other terrestrial objects in the solar system are useless. The atmosphere is, however, almost transparent to radar waves and images of the surface have been produced via earth based and orbital radars. The technique of obtaining radar images of a surface is variously called side looking radar, imaging radar, or synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The radar requires a moving platform in which the antenna is side looking. High resolution is obtained in the cross-track or range direction by conventional radar pulse encoding. In the along-track or azimuth direction, the resolution would normally be the real antenna beam width, but for the SAR case, a much longer antenna (or much sharper beam) is obtained by moving past a surface target as shown in Figure 1, and then combining the echoes from many pulses, by using the doppler data, to obtain the images.

Citation Download Citation

William T. K. Johnson and Alvin T. Edgerton "Venus Radar Mapper (VRM): Multimode Radar System Design", Proc. SPIE 0589, Instrumentation for Optical Remote Sensing from Space, (1 May 1986); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.951926

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