Ice Detection by Roper Onboard China's “Zhurong” Mars Rover: an Laboratory Experiment
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Jianhui, Li; Hai, Liu; Xu, Meng
- Source
- IGARSS 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS 2022 - 2022 IEEE International. :2115-2118 Jul, 2022
- Subject
- Aerospace
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Geoscience
Photonics and Electrooptics
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Signal Processing and Analysis
Space vehicles
Water
Mars
Radar remote sensing
Scattering
Radar
Ice
Zhurong rover
Mars Rover Penetrating Radar (RoPeR)
Water ice
Dry ice
Polarization decomposition
- Language
- ISSN
- 2153-7003
On May 22, 2021, China's first Mars Rover “Zhurong” began its exploration on the Utopian Plain of Martian northern hemisphere. It carries a Mars Rover Penetrating Radar (RoPeR) which contains a high- and a low-frequency channels. The high-frequency channel is equipped with a full polarimetric antenna array with a central frequency of 1.3 GHz, whose scientific objective is to find potential water ice and/or dry ice in the subsurface of Mars. In this study, laboratory experiments are carried out to validate the feasibility of RoPeR to detect and discriminate ices. Results preliminarily reveal that the reflection signals from the bottom of the dry ice and water ice present different polarimetric scattering mechanism based on H-a polarization decomposition.