Summary
International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation
2013
Session Number:WP-C
Session:
Number:WP-C-12
Preliminary Study of a Ground Penetrating Radar for Subsurface Sounding of Solid Bodies in the Solar System
T. Ito, R. Katayama, T. Manabe, T. Nishibori, J. Haruyama, T. Matsumoto, H. Miyamoto,
pp.-
Publication Date:2013/10/22
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
This paper investigates the detectability performance of a breadboard model of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) for subsurface sounding of solid bodies in the Solar System up to a depth of tens of meters. The developed GPR uses a linear FM chirp signal whose frequency is linearly swept from 300 MHz to 900 MHz for 330 μs and can produce a narrower pulse of greater peak amplitude by applying a pulse compression technique. Vivaldi antennas are selected as the antennas of the radar system and designed by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method to minimize the S11 parameter in the operational frequencies. A laboratory experiment for the radar electronics demonstrates that amplitude modulation of a transmitted signal by specific window functions could increase its dynamic range. The S11 parameter of the developed antenna is found to be very close to the desired value. Finally, subsurface sounding is simulated by modeling the two-layer subsurface structure. The simulation results reveal that the GPR could observe the subsurface structures up to a depth of 10?20 m from the air and a depth of 15?25 m from the ground.