Assessing the Morphometry of Pit Craters on Venus from Orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar Data

The comprehension of pit craters on Venus’ surface is still limited both in terms of genetic process and geometric characteristics. Pit craters are valuable features for planetary scientists and geologists as they offer a window into a planetary body’s history, geological processes, and environmental conditions. In this context, morphometry is a valuable tool for unraveling the geological history of these structures and for comparative investigations with analogous features occurring on other celestial bodies. In this study, we present a methodology utilizing orbital Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to estimate the characteristics of Venusian pits. Our findings demonstrate that it is feasible to estimate the depth of a given pit crater by analyzing reflections from the pit’s wall facing the radar illumination direction. This method offers an additional estimate of the pit’s depth, complementing literature techniques based on radar shadows, which may not always be available depending on the acquisition geometry. Depending on the configuration of the pit’s interior structure, the depth estimation derived from the pit wall’s reflections is potentially less prone to geometric distortions than the one obtained from the radar shadow. The morphometric analysis of Venusian pits, based on the radar-derived parameters from Magellan SAR data, reveals that these pits exhibit very large collapse volumes and remarkable morphological similarities with lunar pit craters. This discovery has implications for comparative planetology, shedding light on potential shared mechanisms and processes governing the formation and evolution of such features.