A New Technique for Simulating Radar Echoes from Layered Subsurface Targets

Reliable electromagnetic simulators are of prime importance for the design of radar sounder instruments and for supporting the subsequent interpretation of their data. In this paper we present a coherent simulator based on the facet method that can compute radar echoes from the subsurface of a target area with an arbitrary number of geological layers, thus going beyond the mere 1- or 2-layer descriptions usually modelled by coherent ray-tracing radar sounder simulators. The simulator has been validated using real radar data of lunar areas characterized by a multilayer nature collected by the Lunar Radar Sounder (LRS) instrument of JAXA's Kaguya probe. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed simulator.