Radar Soundings of the Subsurface of Mars

Abstract

International audienceThe martian subsurface has been probed to kilometer depths by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter. Signals penetrate the polar layered deposits, probably imaging the base of the deposits. Data from the northern lowlands of Chryse Planitia have revealed a shallowly buried quasi-circular structure about 250 kilometers in diameter that is interpreted to be an impact basin. In addition, a planar reflector associated with the basin structure may indicate the presence of a low-loss deposit that is more than 1 kilometer thick

Permittivity estimation of layers beneath the northern polar layered deposits, Mars

“…Indeed, they reveal only the ice/ rock interface in the North PLD's, i.e., the base of the polar cap [Picardi et al, 2005]. This aspect simplifies our model to three homogeneous layers (see Figure 1).…”

“…[3] Both the North [e.g., Picardi et al, 2005;Putzig et al, 2009] and the South [e.g., Plaut et al, 2007;Seu et al, 2007a] PLD's have been observed by the MARSIS [Picardi et al, 2004] and SHARAD [Seu et al, 2007b] subsurface sounding radars, which operate in the HF and VHF bandwidth, respectively. Subsurface radar sounding is the only viable technique that can provide information in the third dimension (depth) of a planet from orbit.…”

GPR Estimation of the Geometrical Features of Buried Metallic Targets in Testing Conditions

“…GPR is often employed for nondestructive testing close to a ground interface with the aim of localizing buried targets in the shallow subsurface, such as in landmine detection and other important civil, forensic, archaeological, geophysical, and planetary applications [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10].…”

Pseudo 3D Imaging of Dielectric and Magnetic Anomalies from GPR Data

“…The physical conclusion related to (9) is that a linear reconstruction will be substantially the same for dielectric and magnetic targets (we have a formal difference of the two object functions, but it is irrelevant), and in particular, any linear reconstruction will not able to distinguish whether the focused target was dielectric or magnetic (or both) contrasted with the surrounding soil.…”

“…Recently, it has been outlined that the anomalies and/or the background scenario can exhibit magnetic properties, even in the radio-frequency and microwave range [3][4][5][6][7][8][9].…”