Problem: You are a radar engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and are tasked by your boss to design a radar system for the next NASA airborne mission. Because of other instrumentation on the airplane, the airplane must fly at 8000 m and for efficiency you need the radar to map a 5 km swath on a single pass, with the center of the swath at
A 45o incidence angle. Your teammate on the radar engineering team suggests you use a transmitted pulse length of 1.0 μs.
(a) You choose to use an L-band (f = 1.25 GHz) radar. How wide of a radar aperture do you need to achieve your ideal experimental design?
(b) The airplane fuselage only allows for a 2 m long aperture for your radar in the azimuth direction. What is the area of your illuminated footprint on the ground?
(c) Your teammate on the radar engineering team asks if you can make the radar system "coherent". What does that mean? How could that help improve the resolution of your radar? If you implement this change, how would the effective footprint change (in terms of area)? Be as specific as possible.