Long term simulations for bi-static radar and test bench design
Ricardo Granados, Alain Hèrique, E. S. Rochat, Le-Coarer · 2018
Instruments like CONSERT aboard Rosetta mission, is a technology capable to study the interior of small bodies (asteroids and comets) in the Solar System. Nowadays the knowledge of internal structure is based in remote sensing and theoretical modeling. This approaches cannot give enough details to completely unveil the evolution of the body. Bi-static radar instead offers this possibility. This type of radar demands high accuracy time synchronization between both electronics. One way to improve science is to understand the clock generation signals and how this will affect the measurement to propose compensation techniques. In this paper we present first the bi-static radar concept, we then expose the time analysis and propose a modification of the transponder structure to measure the clock drift between both clocks. We develop a Kalman filter to improve the estimation and compensate the time error. To verify our models and evaluate them, we present a test bench design to collect data from real clocks.