Abstract
The Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) onboard the Yutu-2 rover from China’s Chang’E-4 (CE-4) mission is used to probe the subsurface structure and the near-surface stratigraphic structure of the lunar regolith on the farside of the Moon. Structural analysis of regolith could provide abundant information on the formation and evolution of the Moon, in which the rock location and property analysis are the key procedures during the interpretation of LPR data. The subsurface velocity of electromagnetic waves is a vital parameter for stratigraphic division, rock location estimates, and calculating the rock properties in the interpretation of LPR data. In this paper, we propose a procedure that combines the regolith rock extraction technique based on local correlation between the two sets of LPR high-frequency channel data and the common offset semblance analysis to determine the velocity from LPR diffraction hyperbola. We consider the heterogeneity of the regolith and derive the relative permittivity distribution based on the rock extraction and semblance analysis. The numerical simulation results show that the procedure is able to obtain the high-precision position and properties of the rock. Furthermore, we apply this procedure to CE-4 LPR data and obtain preferable estimations of the rock locations and the properties of the lunar subsurface regolith.
Highlights
The surface of the Moon is covered by regolith, which records at least a 4-billion-year history of meteoroid impacts and implantation of solar wind
The region selection of the data will influence the determination of the vertex position of the diffractions, which will affect the accuracy of semblance analysis
We derived the similarity between filtered Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) CH-2A and CH-2B data based on the local the correlation, would help LPR
Summary
The surface of the Moon is covered by regolith, which records at least a 4-billion-year history of meteoroid impacts and implantation of solar wind. The estimation of regolith thickness usually uses indirect measurements including seismic experiments [2], microwave remote sensing [3], and impact crater morphology and frequency distribution of the crater diameters [4]. Radar Sounder [6], Chang’E-3 conducted the first in situ Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR). Exploration with a wide frequency band and high spatial resolution in the Imbrium basin, showing the detailed structure of lunar regolith [7,8]. Chang’E-4 (CE-4) is conducting the first in situ exploration on the farside of the Moon in the Von Kármán crater at the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin [9,10]. CH-1 is used to map the structure of the shallow lunar crust with meter-level resolution and the CH-2 is used
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