WISDOM GPR Designed for Shallow and High-Resolution Sounding of the Martian Subsurface

Abstract

The Water Ice Subsurface Deposit Observation on Mars (WISDOM) Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is one of the instruments that have been selected as part of the Pasteur payload of the European Space Agency's (ESA's) 2018 ExoMars Rover mission. The main scientific objectives of the mission are to search for evidence of past and present life and to characterize the nature of the shallow subsurface. The Rover is equipped with a drill that can sample the subsurface down to a depth of approximately 2 m. The WISDOM GPR is the only instrumentation capable of obtaining information about the nature of the subsurface along the Rover path before drilling. WISDOM has been designed to explore the first ~3 m of the subsurface with a vertical resolution of a few centimeters. The paper presents a description of the WISDOM instrument with a particular emphasis on the electronic architecture and antenna design that have been chosen to meet the challenging technical objectives. Some preliminary measurements obtained with the prototype are given to illustrate the instrument's potential performance.