On 12/16/16 9:54 PM, Mark Sims wrote:
http://clasp-research.engin.umich.edu/missions/cygnss/docs/CYGNSS_FactSheet_October2014.pdf
I wonder what the return signal strength of the reflected signals is?
There's quite a few of these bistatic radar using GPS as illuminator
things over the years, airborne and space borne.
You get a fairly big signal: if you're in LEO, the signal has already
gone 20,000 km from GPS satellite to surface of earth,reflects and goes
400-1000 km more. The entire earth is illuminated, and the antenna on
the spacecraft sees pretty much everything within a thousand km
(depending on the height.
The reflectivity of ocean water is quite high, and even soil is pretty
good. The number is usually worked as sigma0 (pronounced sigma naught),
which is the normalized radar cross section - RCS in square meters per
square meter of surface.
Typical numbers for L-band range from -20 to +10 dB - depending on the
material and whether there are features (waves, furrows) that result in
bragg scattering in a preferred direction (this is how you measure the
wind speed with a radar from space)
The trick on this kind of measurement is not detecting the signal in the
first place, it's getting some kind of spatial resolution - the signal
from thousands of square km is big, the signal from any little square is
small.
GPS is useful because you can build a fairly simple receiver, record the
raw bits, and then, on the ground, post process to extract the direct
signals (which gives you the satellite position and time very
accurately) and get the reflections.. By combining the data from
multiple satellites (made much easier because you know the time and
position of each recording), you can get measurements for discrete areas
on the surface of the Earth. It's a sort of multilateration process,
and solving a big set of linear equations - much like any form of
tomography. Each GNSS satellite/observer pair gives you a "reflected
power vs delay" curve, a given delay maps into a sort of egg shaped
ellipse on the surface of the earth. You can form a linear equation for
each egg/slice/ellipse, and then iteratively solve the system (since the
measurements are noisy, etc.)
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