Simulation and Processing Radar Tools for planetary and small bodies observation

Today sounding radar has become an efficient technique for planetary sciences to image from an orbiting probe the sub-surface of planets and satellites as well as internal structure of small bodies (Herique et al., 2018). The SPRATS software suite provides a coherent set of simulation and processing tools for  radar remote sensing instruments in planetary science. It allows to rely on the same set of tools during the whole lifetime of a radar instrument from the definition of the instrument mission to the science analysis, including the validation of the signal quality during the payload development, the mission analysis in preparation of the in-flight operations, the calibration, signal pre-processing and also the high-level analysis,  the production of science product and  the archiving. This includes auxiliary tools to handle input data as orbitography and DTM to support the data interpretation. The key point is to share the same algorithms to exploit both and together observational measurements and simulations (Gassot et al., 2020).

The radar team users make use of SPRATS in the frame of various radar instrument: RIME for Juice mission to provide a specific simulation and signal processing pipeline, but also SHARAD on MRO and MARSIS on Mars Express. Concerning small bodies observation, SPRATS is applied in the frame of JuRa for HERA mission (Michel et al., 2022) and the low frequency radar on-board RAMSES.

The toolbox is composed of five main modules, which address different level of radar processing. A first module manages the main auxiliary inputs: the generation and handling of orbitography data and DTM related functions. Another module includes all tools for instrument electronics and antenna modeling. A third module, bring simulation algorithms of synthetic signals

SPRATS fulfills these requirements by implementing an IDL language code library, which relies on C++ and Cuda parallel computing. It is linked to a pipelining and meta-data management system to ensure good traceability and reproducibility of the produced dataset.