Advance of WISDOM GPR antenna for ExoMars 2018 mission

Abstract

The Experiment “Water Ice and Subsurface Deposit Observations on Mars” (WISDOM) is a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) selected to be part of the Pasteur payload on board the rover of European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars 2018 mission. The GPR antenna system described in this paper is the consequent progression of former developments [1, 2] incorporating changed requirements and further optimizations. Main constraints are the mass, the temperature range as well as the ultra-wide band demand. The antenna requirements which are to fulfill for this very specific GPR application are described here. Furthermore, it is given an overview about the lightweight design and its realization. Simulated and measured antenna performance is compared in this paper.