Master of Science Torbjørn Tveito will Friday December 19th, 2025, at 12:15 hold his Thesis Defense for the PhD degree in Science. The title of the thesis is:
« Planetary radar imaging capabilities of EISCAT 3D: method development and evaluation »
EISCAT 3D is a new radar facility in Northern Fennoscandia. It is a phased array with three main receiver locations, one of which will also be capable of transmitting. We have investigated its aptitude for various planetary radar applications. It is well equipped to observe the lunar nearside. There are multiple hour-long observation windows each lunar month, totaling approximately 10^3 hours per year. Over the coming decade, variations in the lunar orbit will result in migration of the sub-radar point as seen by EISCAT 3D. This will allow for imaging of both poles and Mare Orientale. The facility can also be used to measure the orbital elements of NEOs, which is particularly useful for NEOs with close approaches at high latitudes, as this region of space is not well covered by other facilities. A scanning pattern for EISCAT 3D is presented, which we predict will allow the facility to discover NEOs with no a priori orbit estimates. A technique was developed for estimating the solution to the inverse problem which causes the range-Doppler ambiguity in SAR measurements. Our algorithm enables disambiguation without the use of interferometry or selective illumination. Rather, it makes use of the different arrangement of summed measurements over distinct range-Doppler geometries. This allows radar facilities where other, previously established disambiguation procedures are infeasible to produce disambiguated SAR maps.
1st Opponent: Researcher Dr. Anne Virkki, University of Helsinki, Finland
2nd Opponent: Professor Lassi Roininen, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland
Internal member and leader of the committee: Associate Professor Malin Johansson, Department of Physics and Technology, Faculty of Science and Technology, UiT, Norway