RADAR ECHO VARIATIONS OF A LARGE ROUGH SPHERE
Abstract
The effect of surface roughness on the radar backscattering cross section of a perfectly conducting nominally spherical target is examined by applying the Kirchhoff method. It is shown that, for the type of roughness and sphere size to which the Kirchhoff method is applicable, the standard deviation of the cross section increases with frequency according to the law 2 square root of (2 sigma sub 0) K zeta until the first Fresnel zone reduces in size to the scale length of the roughness. At this point a knee in the curve occurs and its further course is determined by a more detailed statistical description of the surface. Here sigma sub 0 is the nominal cross section, zeta is the standard deviation of the surface height h and k = 2 lambda where lambda is the wavelength. Some experimental results are reported which support the theoretical conclusions and, moreover, indicate that they may be useful even when the scale length of the roughness is smaller than the wavelength. Further theoretical results are included concerning the effect of roughness on a general second order surface and the correlation function for the cross section.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 14, 1965
- Accession Number
- AD0621568
Entities
People
- M. L. Burrows
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology