The Effect of Martian Ionospheric Dispersion on SAR Imaging

Abstract

When passing through the ionosphere, the high-frequency (HF) pulse signal of the Mars Exploration Radar is affected by the dispersion effect error, which results in signal attenuation and time delay and brings about a phase advance in such a way that the echo cannot be matched and filtered. In this paper, a high-order phase model is built to overcome the above problems and enable echo matching and filtering. Most studies on the dispersion effect approximate the additional phase after the effect, assuming that the ionosphere is a thin-layer structure. In this paper, an effective model for the HF waveband is constructed to analyze the change of signal propagation paths in the ionosphere. The additional phase is expanded in a Taylor series and retained these expansions as high-order terms to calculate the cumulative additional phase along the path. We show the range-offset variables of signal frequency, bandwidth, and electron density, simulate the effects of the ionosphere under different conditions, and conclude that the model can effectively estimate Mars without considering the effects of magnetic fields and anomalous solar activity and the effect of the ionosphere on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) echoes. The results obtained using ray tracing calculations are different from those obtained by simplifying assumptions, and we can simulate the Martian ionospheric effects by the former.