Venus Radar Mapper (VRM): Multimode radar system design

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 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, and then combining the echoes from many pulses, by using the Doppler data, to obtain the images. The radar design of the Venus Radar Mapper (VRM) is discussed. It will acquire global radar imagery and altimetry data of the surface of Venus.