Interferometric Sounding Using a Metamaterial-Based Compressive Reflector Antenna

• Published in: IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation Vol. 66; no. 5; pp. 2188 - 2198
• Main Authors: Molaei, Ali, Juesas, Juan Heredia, Blackwell, William J., Martinez-Lorenzo, Jose Angel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2018
• Subjects: Antennas; Compressive reflector antenna (CRA); imaging; Magnetic resonance imaging; Manganese; Mathematical model; metamaterial absorber; Metamaterials; phased array; radio interferometry; Sensors
• ISSN: 0018-926X; 1558-2221
• DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2018.2809488

This paper describes a new coded interferometric system for sensing the physical temperature radiated from the Earth's surface. The proposed system consists of a compressive reflector antenna (CRA) coated with metamaterial absorbers (MMAs). The CRA and the MMA are used to code the received electromagnetic (EM) field in space and in frequency, at the focal plane array. The MMA is modeled by an equivalent magnetodielectric medium having a definite thickness. A high-frequency method based on physical optics is used to build the sensing matrix of the system, and the inverse problem is solved using a Nesterov-based compressive sensing (CS) methodology. Numerical examples are carried out in order to reconstruct the physical temperature of the Earth's surface. The performance of the proposed system is compared to that of the conventional interferometric system, GeoSTAR. Preliminary results show that the metamaterial-based CRA provides comparable performance to the GeoSTAR configuration with only half of the feeding elements while keeping the same physical aperture size for the two configurations.