Analysis of Orbital Sounding in Context With In-Situ Ground Penetrating Radar at Jezero Crater, Mars

Creators: Raguso, M. C.^{1, 2}; Nunes, D. C.¹; Shoemaker, E. S.³; Russell, P.⁴; Paige, D. A.⁴; Hamran, S.‐E.⁵

1. Jet Propulsion Lab
2. California Institute of Technology
3. Goddard Space Flight Center
4. University of California, Los Angeles
5. University of Oslo

Abstract

The RIMFAX ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) on Mars2020 Perseverance Rover is the first GPR operated on the Martian surface since February 2021, searching for stratigraphy beneath the Jezero crater. During its operations, GPR detected several strong reflectors extending from the exposed section of the Séitah formation down to depths of 15 m, with derived relative permittivity of ∼9.0 consistent with low‐porosity mafic rocks. We reprocessed all the SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) observations at a higher resolution and combined repeat‐passes coherently and/or incoherently for clutter mitigation. We then examined the bright returns searching for subsurface structures. The reprocessed data did not show any shallow reflectors like those detected by RIMFAX. We investigated possible factors influencing the lack of shallow reflectors in SHARAD radargrams, including the properties of the older volcanic lithologies and the significant variability of subsurface reflectors within the SHARAD km‐wide spatial footprint, which prevents the formation of coherent reflections.

Copyright and License

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We thank Prof. Roberto Seu for the MOLA-based simulator, which played an integral role in our mapping efforts. E.S.S. acknowledges support from the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP), administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). M.C.R. also thanks the NPP and acknowledges support from the Mars2020 RIMFAX team. The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). © 2024. California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged.

Data Availability

SHARAD standard data are available through the PDS (https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mro/sharad.htm), CTX and HIRISE at (https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/mro.html). Super-resolved data surveyed are available on Zenodo (Raguso, 2024). Open-source version of the BWE software is available at: https://github.com/NicOudart/PyBWE/tree/2024.02.2 (Oudart, 2024).

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Geophysical Research Letters - 2024 - Raguso - Analysis of Orbital Sounding in Context With In‐Situ Ground Penetrating.pdf

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