Beyond application for NASA missions, other commercialization opportunities come from federal and municipal sources. Spectrums in the HF and VHF are commonly used for foliage penetration and the detection of hidden targets underground. Federal customers could clearly benefit from the greater application of 3D tomography at these frequency ranges to add another dimension of resolution to their future surveillance platforms. Municipal organizations may also utilize 3D tomography for the better detection of soil moisture, as well as improvements in estimating snow cover in mountainous areas. There are many other applications in the areas of academia and industry which could benefit from 3D tomographic imagery. Some of those include climate research, structure integrity evaluation, subsurface object location for utilities and geophysical feature locating. Multiple NASA programs will be able to utilize one or all of the 3D tomography technologies developed under this program including work related to MARSIS (or follow-on programs), the SCLP snow radar and the ice sheet depth sounder. A follow-on program to the MARSIS mission could employ at least two antennas, with a multi-channel radar system facilitating the gathering data for 3D tomography in a reduced number of passes at VHF. Due to the large wavelengths, multi-pass data collection is likely required in the HF spectrum. Two programs identified in the decadal survey which could benefit from advances made in this program are the ice sheet depth sounder and the SCLP snow radar. The snow radar could employ the multi-channel acquisition system to apply tomographic techniques to snow accumulation rates, while the ice sheet depth sounder could use both the antenna and multi-channel receiver for similar purposes.
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