FETD-Based Tomographic Full-Wave Radar Imaging of Small Solar System Body Interiors

This research plan aims at opening new possibilities and prospects in space research and astrophysics and to support the science goals of the future space missions by radio wave imaging. Our aim is to enable the pre-processing and inversion of tomographic full-waveform radar measurements with a small Solar System body, i.e., asteroid or comet, as a target. The global interior structure of asteroids and comets is essential in the theories on the history and evolution of the Solar System. Low-frequency (10-20 MHz) radar tomography (RT) provides one of the few direct measurement techniques for sounding the global scale interior permittivity distribution. We have published some of the key papers concentrating on this topic, developing the central mathematical methodology as well as showing the necessity of the full-wave RT. The project proposed will provide full-wave RT software tools needed in high-performance (1) forward and (2) inverse computations and (3) pre-processing.