A Coherent Method for Simulating Active and Passive Radar Sounding of the Jovian Icy Moons

The possibility to apply passive radar sounding techniques to the Jovian icy moons, making use of Jupiter’s strong decametric emissions (DAMs), has recently garnered large research interest. In this article, we propose a radar sounding simulation approach being able to simulate and compare passive and active acquisitions for a given scenario. The proposed simulator is based on the Stratton–Chu integral used with the linear phase approximation on triangular facets. The external field is modeled with plane waves, the direction, polarization, and amplitude of which can be freely chosen. The time-domain dependence can be either synthetically generated (e.g., Gaussian white noise) or taken from experimental measurements (e.g., waveforms recorded by a radio telescope observing Jupiter). For passive sounding, both autocorrelation and cross-correlation processing are considered. Validation tests were conducted on a series of ideal digital elevation models (DEMs), such as flat surfaces and subsurfaces, or Gaussian rough surfaces, and a good agreement with the existing literature was obtained. To illustrate the capabilities of the proposed simulator, we conducted additional more realistic experiments of radar sounding simulations, where we use both white noise and Jovian waveforms recorded by the LWA1 radio telescope.