Marsis radar signal simulation

We are going to present here a radar sounding simulation which could be used to validate the radar echoes processing and to support the interpretation of the future Marsis data. In order to follow the Marsis radar sounding process scheme,the first step in the building of our simulation was to model the Martian surface. Many surface modelisation methods have been developed and can be found in the literature, but considering the fact Martian surface is mostly smooth, the modelisation algorithm we developed uses the Facet Method scheme. We will show that this method is a valuable process to model a smooth surface. This method is a very fast one, the computation time it takes is short comparatively to other methods. We will discuss the implementation of the algorithm and show results. Then this surface model allowed us to simulate the global radar echoes. We will present results of simulations using the model of Martian surface and adding some subsurface structures. The instrument simulation we defined makes strict reference ot the Marsis radar settings, anyway it may model any SAR radar with a nadir looking configuration.