Radar Moon bounce operations process

The Mini-RF radar instrument was initially included as a technology demonstration on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbit (LRO) spacecraft launched in 2009. During the nominal LRO mission, the data acquisition strategy transitioned from one centered on demonstrating the capability of the low-power, low-mass instrument design to one focused on addressing scientific questions central to the goals of the LRO mission. Mini-RF acquired individual radar images of the lunar surface, amounting to 98 TB of data, during a 14-month period of daily operation. As the LRO spacecraft was transitioning to its first extended mission, in December of 2010, a malfunction of the instrument transmitter prevented further data collection with the nominal instrument architecture. The Mini-RF receiver and other instrument subsystems were not affected by the malfunction so a campaign to observe the Moon in concert with a ground-based radar asset (Arecibo Observatory) using a bistatic architecture was devised. This architecture presents unique challenges to both planning for data acquisition and processing downlinked data to form a radar image of the lunar surface.