Surface properties of the seas of Titan as revealed by Cassini mission bistatic radar experiments.

Saturn's moon Titan was explored by the Cassini spacecraft from 2004 to 2017. While Cassini revealed a lot about this Earth-like world, its radar observations could only provide limited information about Titan's liquid hydrocarbons seas Kraken, Ligeia and Punga Mare. Here, we show the results of the analysis of the Cassini mission bistatic radar experiments data of Titan's polar seas.

Small variations in ice composition and layer thickness explain bright reflections below martian polar cap without liquid water.

Abnormally bright radar reflections below the Martian south polar layered deposit were originally interpreted as evidence of subglacial liquid water. However, unlike on Earth, conditions beneath the Martian ice are too cold to create or maintain meltwater. In this work, we use radar reflectivity simulations to show that the strong reflections can instead be caused by constructive interference between dusty ice layers that are more closely spaced than the radar resolution.