Radar imaging of solar system ices.

摘要

We map the planet Mercury and Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Callisto using Earth-based radar telescopes and find that all of these have regions exhibiting high, depolarized radar backscatter and polarization inversion (mu c > 1). Both characteristics suggest significant volume scattering from water ice or similar cold-trapped volatiles. Synthetic aperture radar mapping of Mercury's north and south polar regions at fine (6 km) resolution at 3.5 cm wavelength corroborates the results of previous 13 cm investigations of enhanced backscatter and polarization inversion (0.9 ≤ muc ≤ 1.3) from areas on the floors of craters at high latitudes, where Mercury's near-zero obliquity results in permanent Sun shadows. Co-registration with Mariner 10 optical images shows that this enhanced scattering cannot be caused by simple double-bounce geometries, since the bright, reflective regions do not appear on the radar-facing wall but, instead, in shadowed regions not directly aligned with the radar look direction. Thermal models require the existence of such a layer to preserve ice deposits in craters at other than high polar latitudes. The additional attenuation (factor 1.64 +/- 15%) of the 3.5 cm wavelength data from these experiments over previous 13 cm radar observations is consistent with a range of layer thickness from 0 +/- 11 to 35 +/- 15 cm, depending on the assumed scattering law exponent n.; Our 3.5 cm wavelength bistatic aperture synthesis observations of the two outermost Galilean satellites of Jupiter, Ganymede and Callisto, resolve the north-south ambiguity of previous images, and confirm the disk-integrated enhanced backscatter and polarization inversion noted in prior investigations. The direct imaging technique more clearly shows that higher backscatter areas are associated with the terrain that has undergone recent resurfacing, such as the sulci and the impact crater basins. The leading hemispheres of both moons have somewhat higher (20% +/- 5%) depolarized echoes than their trailing hemispheres, suggesting additional wavelength-scale structure in the regolith.; Two improvements to existing delay-Doppler techniques enhance data reduction. First, correlation using subsets of the standard, repetitive pseudo-noise code alleviates Doppler dimension aliasing by properly sampling the output of the range compression stage. Second, a spectral weighting technique reduces clutter in long-code processing by equalizing clutter in the delay and Doppler dimensions.