Dielectric Properties of Lunar Materials at the Chang’e-4 Landing Site
On January 3rd 2019, the Chang’e-4 mission successfully landed in the Von Kármán Crater inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin and achieved the first soft landing on the farside of the Moon. Lunar penetrating radar (LPR) equipped on the rover measured the shallow subsurface structure along the mot...
| Published in: | Remote Sensing |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13204056 https://doaj.org/article/6958b854950f43a6ad4e90a934d65f1e |
| Summary: | On January 3rd 2019, the Chang’e-4 mission successfully landed in the Von Kármán Crater inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin and achieved the first soft landing on the farside of the Moon. Lunar penetrating radar (LPR) equipped on the rover measured the shallow subsurface structure along the motion path for more than 700 m. LPR data could be used to obtain the dielectric properties of the materials beneath the exploration area, providing important clues as to the composition and source of the materials. Although the properties of the upper fine-grained regolith have been studied using various methods, the underlying coarse-grained materials still lack investigation. Therefore, this paper intends to estimate the loss tangent of the coarse-grained materials at depth ranges of ~12 and ~28 m. Stochastic media models with different rock distributions for the LPR finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation are built to evaluate the feasibility of the estimation method. Our results show that the average loss tangent value of coarse-grained materials is <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>0.0104</mn><mo>±</mo><mn>0.0027</mn></mrow></semantics></math> , and the abundance of <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi mathvariant="normal">F</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">e</mi><msub><mi mathvariant="normal">O</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">T</mi></msub><mo>+</mo><mi mathvariant="normal">Ti</mi><msub><mi mathvariant="normal">O</mi><mn>2</mn></msub><mrow><mo> </mo><mi mathvariant="normal">is</mi><mo> </mo></mrow><mn>20.08</mn><mrow><mo> </mo><mi ... |
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