Hyperfine Structure of Regolith Unveiled by Chang'E-5 Lunar Regolith Penetrating Radar

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 60; pp. 1 - 14
• Main Authors: Su, Yan, Wang, Ruigang, Deng, Xiangjin, Zhang, Zongyu, Zhou, Jianfeng, Xiao, Zhiyong, Ding, Chunyu, Li, Yuxi, Dai, Shun, Ren, Xin, Zeng, Xingguo, Gao, Xingye, Liu, Jianjun, Liu, Dawei, Liu, Bin, Zhou, Bin, Fang, Guangyou, Li, Chunlai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Chang’E-5 (CE-5); Coring; Delay effects; Drilling; Extraterrestrial materials; Hyperfine structure; Imaging techniques; lunar regolith; Lunar Regolith Penetrating Radar (LRPR); lunar samples; Lunar surface; Moon; Permittivity; Radar; Radar antennas; Radar arrays; Radar imaging; Regolith; Transmitting antennas
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2022.3148200

This work presents the results of the Lunar Regolith Penetrating Radar (LRPR), installed at the bottom of the Chang'E-5 (CE-5) lander, which is the first antenna-array radar deployed for the investigation of an extraterrestrial body. Radar imaging results unveiled a hyperfine structure for the top 2.5-m-thick lunar regolith with an unprecedented high resolution of 5 cm. The interpretation of the results permitted to state that subsurface regolith is dominated by fine grains with abundant rock fragments. The radar imaging results were also used to drive the drilling process until a fragment jammed the core inlet at about 100-cm underground. Laboratory measurements of the samples returned at Earth allow to estimate the real part of relative permittivity and the loss tangent, which are 3.04 ± 0.02 and 0.014 ± 0.002, respectively.