Abstract
Lunar radar mappings carried out in the late 1960's and 1970's have provided several valuable insights into lunar surface processes. These radar mappings used the delay-Doppler technique developed by Gordon Pettengill and his colleagues. These radar mappings also needed the narrow antenna beams, now available with large radio telescopes such as those at the Arecibo and Haystack Observatories. Two-element radar interferometers have provided resolution of the delay-Doppler ambiguity at meter wavelengths and provided topographic information at centimeter wavelengths. These techniques have provided high-resolution lunar radar-maps at 3.8-cm, 70-cm, and 7.5-m wavelengths, a set of wavelengths which span the window available for Earth-based radar mapping of the Moon.
These radar maps have been used along with other Earth-based and Apollo orbital measurements to define surface units. The radar maps and these other data can describe physical properties such as small-scale (centimeter sized) blockiness and surface chemistry (titanium and iron) content. These estimates of lunar surface properties rely heavily upon extrapolation of surface sampling results.
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Thompson, T.W. A review of earth-based radar mapping of the moon. The Moon and the Planets 20, 179–198 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00898069
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00898069