A possibility of increasing the sensitivity of a radio occultation technique

A. L. Gavrik, Yu. A. Gavrik, T. F. Kopnina
Kotel'nikov Institute of Radio-engineering and Electronics of RAS, Fryazino branch

Received May 5, 2011

 

Abstract. It is shown that new radio physical experiments in which the on-board equipment of orbital spacecrafts receives coherent radio waves transmitted from the ground-based station and measures the power and phase of these waves are needed to increase the sensitivity of radio occultation observations. These experiments will enable one to increase the capacity of the radio link by a factor of about 10 compared with that of traditional experiments, thus increasing the accuracy of the results and the space-time resolution of radio occultation of the ionosphere and the atmosphere of a planet.
Keywords: occultation, radio wave propagation, ionosphere and atmosphere of planets.