Fading from Irregular Surfaces for Line-of-Sight Communications

This paper is concerned with the communications channel between a planetary flyby or orbiting spacecraft and an ejected probe that is traveling toward the planet. Since the mission requires that a significant part of the probe's transmitted energy be reflected from the irregular planet's surface, we will be concerned with the effect of the scattered signal for line-of-sight communications. The statistical distribution of the received field and the fading rate are considered so that the fading margin may be determined for some required probability of satisfactory performance. Typical examples are given for a Martian atmospheric probe.