The Impact of Plasma Wake on Radar Detection

Plasma sheath and plasma wake produced by meteor reentry vehicles flying at high speeds in the atmosphere can affect the detection performance of radar systems. This paper employs the Finite Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method to analyze the two-dimensional bistatic Radar Cross Section (RCS) of entire targets, including blunt bodies along with their plasma sheaths and wakes. The effects of different wake lengths on RCS frequencies of 30MHz, 300 MHz and 1GHz at normal and oblique incidence were investigated. The results showed that the RCS was significantly enhanced by plasma sheath and wake, with the increase being more pronounced at lower frequencies.