Analysis of Orbital Sounding in Context With In-Situ Ground Penetrating Radar at Jezero Crater, Mars

The RIMFAX ground-penetrating radar (GPR) on Mars2020 Perseverance Rover is the first GPR operated on the Martian surface since February 2021, searching for stratigraphy beneath the Jezero crater. During its operations, GPR detected several strong reflectors extending from the exposed section of the S & eacute;itah formation down to depths of 15 m, with derived relative permittivity of similar to 9.0 consistent with low-porosity mafic rocks. We reprocessed all the SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) observations at a higher resolution and combined repeat-passes coherently and/or incoherently for clutter mitigation. We then examined the bright returns searching for subsurface structures. The reprocessed data did not show any shallow reflectors like those detected by RIMFAX. We investigated possible factors influencing the lack of shallow reflectors in SHARAD radargrams, including the properties of the older volcanic lithologies and the significant variability of subsurface reflectors within the SHARAD km-wide spatial footprint, which prevents the formation of coherent reflections. Plain Language Summary The detection of subsurface sequences by RIMFAX beneath the Jezero crater has sparked renewed debate about the possibility of detecting the boundaries between the crater's units from orbit using the Shallow Radar instrument. We have taken full advantage of the entire SHARAD coverage to examine the near-subsurface regions beneath the Jezero crater, looking for subsurface returns. The detection of the reflectors recorded by SHARAD may be compromised by the spurious radar returns, which tend to mask the subsurface signals. Therefore, advanced processing specifically designed for resolution improvement and clutter mitigation have been applied to the entire sounder data set prior to searching for interfaces. Despite the signal enhancements, our survey of 56 observations found no returns from the subsurface stratigraphy. The lack of detections may be ascribed to several aspects, including the properties of the rough ancient materials that characterize the crated floor and the physical limitations of the orbital observations