Locating the LCROSS Impact Craters

The Lunar CRater Observations and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission impacted a spent Centaur rocket stage into a permanently shadowed region near the lunar south pole. The Sheperding Spacecraft (SSC) separated \sim9 hours before impact and performed a small braking maneuver in order to observe the Centaur impact plume, looking for evidence of water and other volatiles, before impacting itself. This paper describes the registration of imagery of the LCROSS impact region from the mid- and near-infrared cameras onboard the SSC, as well as from the Goldstone radar. We compare the Centaur impact features, positively identified in the first two, and with a consistent feature in the third, which are interpreted as a 20 m diameter crater surrounded by a 160 m diameter ejecta region. The images are registered to Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO) topographical data which allows determination of the impact location. This location is compared with the impact location derived from ground-based tracking and propagation of the spacecraft's trajectory and with locations derived from two hybrid imagery/trajectory methods. The four methods give a weighted average Centaur impact location of -84.6796\circ, -48.7093\circ, with a 1{\sigma} un- certainty of 115 m along latitude, and 44 m along longitude, just 146 m from the target impact site. Meanwhile, the trajectory-derived SSC impact location is -84.719\circ, -49.61\circ, with a 1{\sigma} uncertainty of 3 m along the Earth vector and 75 m orthogonal to that, 766 m from the target location and 2.803 km south-west of the Centaur impact. We also detail the Centaur impact angle and SSC instrument pointing errors. Six high-level LCROSS mission requirements are shown to be met by wide margins. We hope that these results facilitate further analyses of the LCROSS experiment data and follow-up observations of the impact region.Comment: Accepted for publication in Space Science Review. 24 pages, 9 figure

NISAR Mission Overview and Performance Summary

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are developing a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mission to map Earth's surface every 12 days, known as the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) Mission. NISAR is being designed to measure changes in Earth's land surface using repeat pass synthetic aperture radar interferometry and polarimetry methods from space, in three science areas: 1) solid earth, including earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain building, and erosion, including landslides; 2) terrestrial ecosystems on which all of life depends, including global carbon distribution and change; 3) cryosphere, including changes in ice sheets, sea ice, and glaciers as key indicators of climate effects. The L-band radar provided by NASA, with its performance characteristics of wide-swath and complete coverage of land and ice twice in 12 days, is suited to measuring surface displacements of the solid earth, ice sheet velocities in Greenland and Antarctica, sea-ice motion, and ecosystem variables such as biomass, disturbance, and wetlands and agriculture area. In addition, the fast and reliable sampling in time will be used to develop reliable applications such as subsidence mapping, hazard assessment and disaster response. The radar is a scan-on-receive system that can be operated with fixed or variable pulse repetition frequency (PRF). With fixed PRF, because of the wide swath and required Doppler sampling, there will be gaps in the received swath during transmit events. With variable PRF, these gaps can be filled in at some cost of added multiplicative noise. In this paper, we will review the mission characteristics and observation plan, describe the radar performance with regard to traditional imaging metrics, and also describe the performance relative to the science requirements as predicted by the mission's performance tool

Spotlight-Mode Synthetic Aperture Radar Processing for High-Resolution Lunar Mapping

During the 2008-2009 year, the Goldstone Solar System Radar was upgraded to support radar mapping of the lunar poles at 4 m resolution. The finer resolution of the new system and the accompanying migration through resolution cells called for spotlight, rather than delay-Doppler, imaging techniques. A new pre-processing system supports fast-time Doppler removal and motion compensation to a point. Two spotlight imaging techniques which compensate for phase errors due to i) out of focus-plane motion of the radar and ii) local topography, have been implemented and tested. One is based on the polar format algorithm followed by a unique autofocus technique, the other is a full bistatic time-domain backprojection technique. The processing system yields imagery of the specified resolution. Products enabled by this new system include topographic mapping through radar interferometry, and change detection techniques (amplitude and coherent change) for geolocation of the NASA LCROSS mission impact site

Improved Absolute Radiometric Calibration of a UHF Airborne Radar

The AirMOSS airborne SAR operates at UHF and produces fully polarimetric imagery. The AirMOSS radar data are used to produce Root Zone Soil Moisture (RZSM) depth profiles. The absolute radiometric accuracy of the imagery, ideally of better than 0.5 dB, is key to retrieving RZSM, especially in wet soils where the backscatter as a function of soil moisture function tends to flatten out. In this paper we assess the absolute radiometric uncertainty in previously delivered data, describe a method to utilize Built In Test (BIT) data to improve the radiometric calibration, and evaluate the improvement from applying the method

The DESDynI Synthetic Aperture Radar Array-Fed Reflector Antenna

DESDynI is a mission being developed by NASA with radar and lidar instruments for Earth-orbit remote sensing. This paper focuses on the design of a largeaperture antenna for the radar instrument. The antenna comprises a deployable reflector antenna and an active switched array of patch elements fed by transmit/ receive modules. The antenna and radar architecture facilitates a new mode of synthetic aperture radar imaging called 'SweepSAR'. A system-level description of the antenna is provided, along with predictions of antenna performance

Lunar Topographic Mapping Using a New High Resolution Mode for the GSSR Radar

Mapping the Moon's topography using Earth based radar interferometric measurements by the Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) has been done several times since the mid 1990s. In 2008 we reported at this conference the generation of lunar topographic maps having approximately 4 m height accuracy at a horizontal posting of 40 m. Since then GSSR radar has been improved to allow 40 MHz bandwidth imaging and consequently obtained images and interferograms with a resolution of about 4 m in range by 5 m in azimuth. The long synthetic aperture times of approximately 90 minutes in duration necessitated a migration from range/Doppler image formation techniques to spotlight mode processing and autofocusing methods. The improved resolution imagery should permit the generation of topographic maps with a factor of two better spatial resolution with about same height accuracy. Coupled the with the recent availability of new lidar topography maps of the lunar surface made by orbiting satellites of Japan and the United States the geodetic control of the radar generated maps products can be improved dramatically. This paper will discuss the hardware and software improvements made to the GSSR and present some of the new high resolution products

Arecibo Radar Astrometry of the Galilean Satellites from 1999 to 2016

Harmon et al. Arecibo radar observations from 1992 provided some of the most precise line-of-sight distance (ranging) measurements of Ganymede and Callisto to date. We report 18 new ranges obtained at Arecibo from 1999 to 2016, among which are the first measurements of Io and Europa. We also report accompanying line-of-sight velocity (Doppler frequency) measurements. In 2015, we detected Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto with time-delay (range) resolutions as fine as 10 mu s (1.5 km) while Io was detected with 70 mu s (10.5 km) resolution. We estimated residuals for the radar measurements with respect to the latest JPL satellite ephemeris JUP310 and planetary ephemeris DE438. We found that the rms of the time-delay residuals are 29 mu s for Io, 21 mu s for Europa, 58 mu s for Ganymede, and 275 mu s for Callisto. When normalized by the measurement uncertainties, these correspond to the rms of 0.82, 1.25, 2.17, and 3.17 respectively. As such, the orbit of Callisto has the largest residuals and may benefit from an orbital update that will use radar astrometry. All Doppler residuals were small and consistent with their 1 sigma uncertainties.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]