A VHF Radar for Deployment on a UAV for Basal Imaging of Polar Ice

A VHF-band radar is being developed to characterize polar ice sheets and their basal conditions from a UAV developed specifically for low-altitude polar operation. The radar's 195-MHz center frequency, 30-MHz bandwidth, and 200-W transmit power will map internal layers and ice thickness with a depth resolution of less than 3 m in ice, and image the ice-bed interface. To satisfy the mass and volume constraints of the UAV, a distributed architecture was developed employing transmit/receive modules mounted on each of the eight wing-mounted wide-bandwidth Vivaldi antennas. An eight-channel digital waveform generator will be used to create transmit waveforms to simultaneously measure ice thickness and map internal layers along the nadir track, and image ice-bed interface on the left and right sides of the platform in strip-map mode.