Spaceborne radar sounders are an important class of remote sensing instruments which operate by recording backscattered electromagnetic waves in the vicinity of a solid planetary body. The incoming waves are generally transmitted by the radar itself (active sounding), although external signals of opportunity can also be used (passive sounding). There are currently two major planetary radar sounders under development, both headed to the Jovian icy moons (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto). Designing a radar sounder is a very challenging process involving careful leveraging of heritage and predictive tools, and in which backscattering simulators play a central role. This is especially true for coherent simulators, due to their higher accuracy and the possibility they offer to apply advanced processing techniques on the resulting simulated data, such as synthetic aperture radar focusing, or any other operation which requires field amplitude, phase and polarisation. For this reason, designing computationally-efficient coherent simulators is an important and active research area. The first contribution of this thesis is a novel multilayer coherent simulator based on the Stratton-Chu equation and the linear phase approximation, which can generate realistic simulated radar data on a wide range of surface and subsurface digital elevation models (DEM), using only a fraction of the computational resources that a finite-difference time-domain method would need. Thorough validation was conducted against both theoretical formulations and real data, which confirmed the accuracy of the method. The method was then generalised to noisy active and passive sounding, which is an important capability in the context of the proposed use of passive sounding on the Jovian icy moons. Provided that representative information about the surface and this external field exists, the simulator could compare the relative scientific value of active and passive sounding of a given target under given conditions. However, quality DEMs of the Jovian icy moons are scarce. For this reason we also present a comparative study of the fractal roughness of Europa and Mars (a much better studied body), where we derive fractal analogue maps of twelve types of Europan terrains on Mars. These maps could be used to guide the choice of Martian DEMs on which to perform representative backscattering simulations for future radar missions on Europa. Finally, we explore the possibility of entirely new radar architectures with the novel concept of the distributed radar. In a distributed sounder, very large across-track antennas can be synthesised from smallsats flying on selected orbits, providing a way to obtain a highly-directive antenna without the need to deploy large and complex structures in space. We develop an analytical formulation to treat the problem of beamforming with an array affected by perturbations on the positions of its array elements, and propose a set of Keplerian parameters that enable the concept.

[pt] Este trabalho trata do problema da difração das ondas eletromagnéticas por obstáculos do tipo gume de faca com perfil transversal qualquer. A partir da integral de Huygens-Fresnel (formulação escalar) e da integral de Stratton-Chu (formulação vetorial) é estabelecida uma solução em forma fechada para o problema, cujas interpretação física e aplicações práticas são bastante simples. Os resultados teóricos são verificados por comparação com medidas experimentais para três tipos de perfil transversal: semi-circular, triangular e rampa. Através da mesma formulação é investigado o comportamento do campo atrás do obstáculo, onde existe uma região de interferência formada pelas diversas contribuições independentes do campo difratado. Procurou-se ainda, nos casos dos obstáculos triangular e rampa, interpretar os resultados finais em termos do raio da 1(primeira) zona de Fresnel. Embora o modelo utilizado seja limitado por não considerar a dimensão do obstáculo no sentido de propagação (longitudinal), as conclusões obtidas são de grande importância para os enlaces radioelétricos que operam por difração. / [en] The present work deals with the problem of the diffraction of electromagnetic waves by knife-edge obstacles with arbitrary transverse profile. From the Huygens-Fresnel (acalar formulation) and the Stratton-Chu ( vectorial formulation) integrals, a closed-form solution for the problem is establications. The theoretical results are verified by comparison with experimental measurements fot three kinds od profiles: semi-circular, triangular and ramp. Using this same formulation, the behavior of the field behind the obstacle is investigated, where a region of interference exists caused by the several independet contributions of the diffracted field. An attempt was made to interpret the final results in terms of the first Fresnel zone radius in cases of triangular and ramp obstacles. Although the model used here is limited for not taking into account the longitudinal dimension of the obstacles, the obtained conclusions have major importance to radio links operating in diffraction.