Engineering topics
Thompson, Tommy
Publications and source records attributed to Thompson, Tommy.
The Challenges and Opportunities for International Cooperative Radio Science; Experience with Mars Express and Venus Express Missions
Radio Science is an opportunistic discipline in the sense that the communication link between a spacecraft and its supporting ground station can be used to probe the intervening media remotely. Radio science has recently expanded to greater, cooperative use of international assets. Mars Express and Venus Express are two such cooperative missions managed by the European Space Agency with broad international science participation supported by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) and ESA's tracking network for deep space missions (ESTRAK). This paper provides an overview of the constraints, opportunities, and lessons learned from international cross support of radio science, and it explores techniques for potentially optimizing the resultant data sets.
Modeling Lunar Radar Scattering from Icy Regoliths
The Apollo 15, 16, and 17 core tubes show that the uppermost few meters of the lunar regolith are interlaced layers of a fine grained powders and blocky crater ejecta. The layers of crater ejecta have dielectric constants in the range of 7-9 while the fine-grained powders has dielectric constant on the order of 2.7. These differences in dielectric constant, in turn, create radar reflections that are both refracted and reflected back through the space-regolith interface. Note that for a dielectric constant of 2.7 for the lunar regolith, radio waves incident on the lunar surface at the angle of 30-degrees from the normal will propagate in the regolith at an angle of 18-degrees. At the limb, radio waves incident on the lunar surface at an angle near 90-degrees from the normal will propagate in the regolith at an angle of about 37-degrees. These angles are within the range where radar backscatter is in the quasi-specular regime. When these buried crater ejecta layers are modeled using Hagfors' formulation (Hagfors,1963), echo powers match the behavior observed for average lunar backscatter at centimeter wavelengths for higher (30 to 90) angles of incidence. In addition, Hagfors et al. (1965) conducted an experiment where the Moon was illuminated at 23-cm wavelength with circular polarization and the differences were observed in orthogonal linear polarizations. Modeling of these observations and assuming again that the buried crater ejecta scatter in a quasi-specular manner, echo differences in horizontal and vertical linear polarizations are in good agreement with the observations.
Estimating and Modeling S-Band Lunar Radar Backscatter
This viewgraph presentation reviews the estimates and modeling for S-band Lunar radar backscatter. By way of basic review it shows the average lunar radar behavior, the average lunar radar cross-section at 3.8-cm, 23-cm and 68-cm wavelengths. It also reviews the equations for estimating 13 cm scattering from 3.8 and 23 cm data. Charts show the inferred 13-cm average scattering derived from interpolation of the 1960's observations and the modeled 13-cm average scattering. It also reviews the scattering differences: between linear polarizations from slopes from roughness.