Analysis of Lava Tubes’ Roughness and Radar Near-Nadir Regime Backscattering Properties

Lava tubes are terrestrial tunnel-like natural subsurface caves. Mounting evidence suggests their presence on the Moon and Mars. Planetary radar sounders are nadir-looking instruments operating in the high-frequency (HF)/very-HF (VHF) part of the spectrum with subsurface penetration capabilities. Recently, several studies either proposed future mission concepts for lava tubes’ detection or attempted to locate them on the Moon and Mars with the available radar-sounding data. Lava tubes are typically modeled as quasi-cylindrical structures but their actual geometry and their influence on the radar backscattering in near-nadir regime have never been investigated in the literature. These are crucial information for understanding the feasibility of detecting lava tubes by current and future planetary radar sounding systems. Accordingly, in this article: 1) we assess whether lava tubes are self-affine fractal surfaces at horizontal scales relevant to radio and microwave scattering and 2) we evaluate the effect of lava tube topography on the radar backscattering response in the near-nadir regime. Our experimental results, which are inferred from 3-D terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data of planetary lava tube analogs, show that lava tubes: 1) are self-affine fractals at horizontal scales relevant to radar sounding and 2) they are electromagnetically rough surfaces, especially in the VHF band. We provide quantitative values on the lava tube fractal parameters and radar roughness losses along with a discussion on both: 1) the implication of our results on current radar sounding systems’ ability to detect lava tubes and 2) the planning of future missions devoted to lava tube detection and characterization.