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Oct 8, 2020 · The agency's newest rover will use the first ground-penetrating radar instrument on the Martian surface to help search for signs of past microbial life.
- RIMFAX at Work on NASA’s Perseverance (Illustration)
The first ground-penetrating radar set on the surface of...
- RIMFAX at Work on NASA’s Perseverance (Illustration)
The Radar Imager for Mars' subsurface experiment (RIMFAX) is a ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Perseverance rover, part of the Mars 2020 mission. It uses radar waves to see geologic features under the surface.
- 5 to 10 kbytes per sounding location
- 3 kg (6.6 lb)
- 19.6 × 12.0 × 0.66 cm(7.0" × 4.7" × 2.4")
- 5 to 10 watts
Aug 25, 2022 · The Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment instrument has conducted the first rover-mounted ground-penetrating radar survey of the Martian subsurface. A continuous radar image acquired over the Perseverance rover’s initial ~3-kilometer traverse reveals electromagnetic properties and bedrock stratigraphy of the Jezero crater floor to ...
Oct 8, 2020 · The first ground-penetrating radar set on the surface of Mars, RIMFAX can provide a highly detailed view of subsurface structures down to at least 30 feet (10 meters) underground.
- NASA/JPL-Caltech/FFI
- Requirements
- Waveform
- Gating
- Design Considerations
- Electronics Unit
- Calibration Cable
- Antenna
- Modes of Operation
Requirements for the Mars 2020 mission and rover payloads are divided into five levels. Level 1 is the top level covering the complete mission, including bringing a rover to Mars, restrictions on where to land on Mars, total rover drive distance, sample and cache capability, contamination control, planetary protection, and more. The Level 2 require...
Commercial GPR systems used on Earth normally employ time-domain impulse signals. The receivers in these systems are very often time-repetitive sampling receivers (Daniels 2004). It has been shown that this type of waveform sampling is not optimal regarding power consumption and dynamic range (Hamran 1995, 2010). For this reason a Step Frequency (S...
The FMCW signal is gated in a switch before being amplified and fed to the antenna through the antenna switch, see Fig. 5. The gating switches the FMCW signal on and off with a duty cycle up to 50%. The gating frequency is much lower than the transmitted-signal frequency and higher than the baseband signal spectrum. The reflected signal response wi...
The RIMFAX instrument consists of two main subsystems, the electronics unit and the antenna. The electronics unit (EU) resides inside the left aft tower of the rover in a benign, thermally controlled environment, while the antenna is located under the hot RTG facing down to the cold ground (Fig. 2). This results in a large thermal gradient over the...
The main performance requirements (Fig. 3) were used as input for the design and implementation of the instrument. The radar must detect structures close to the surface with good resolution, and at the same time have a high dynamic range to see deep into the ground. This is achieved by executing several soundings in different modes at each position...
The RIMFAX electronics unit has two different outputs for transmitting the FMCW signal: an antenna port, where the antenna is connected via the antenna cable running through the rover bulkhead, and the calibration port, where a 2.8-m calibration cable is connected. The calibration cable is placed close to the RIMFAX electronics, inside the rover, a...
In commercial GPR systems used on Earth the antenna is normally placed on the ground or very close to the ground. This has several benefits, such as good coupling to the ground, lower radiation to the surroundings and achieving a lower frequency for a given antenna size. The drawback of having the antenna on the ground is that the coupling between ...
RIMFAX is designed to operate in different modes in which radar parameters are set to optimize data collection for different subsurface conditions. The RIMFAX gating makes it possible to omit the recording of close-range reflections, typically from the antenna and surface, which would otherwise limit the dynamic range. The removal of these reflecti...
- Svein-Erik Hamran, David A. Paige, Hans E. F. Amundsen, Tor Berger, Sverre Brovoll, Lynn Carter, Lei...
- 2020
Dec 15, 2021 · Along with its rock-core sampling capabilities, Perseverance has brought the first ground-penetrating radar to the surface of Mars. RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment) creates a “radargram” of subsurface features up to about 33 feet (10 meters) deep.
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Aug 25, 2022 · The paper, "Ground penetrating radar observations of subsurface structures in the floor of Jezero crater, Mars," is one of three simultaneously published papers discussing some of...
