The preliminary results of lunar penetrating radar on board the Chinese Chang'e-3 rover

Chinese Chang'e-3 was launched on 2nd December 2013, and it has successfully landed on the moon. The rover was successfully deployed from the lander, and touched the lunar surface on 14 December. One of the payloads on board the Chang'e-3 rover is the Lunar ground-Penetrating Radar (LPR), aimed at observing the lunar subsurface geology at frequency channels of 60MHz and 500MHz. The LPR has worked for 271minutes and 36 seconds to obtain 9960 track data at 60MHz and 19538 track data at 500MHz till 1019 on 1st Jan. 2014 UTC. The rover walking time was 31 minutes and 37 seconds with walking distance of 102.8m, and the total amount of the radar data is 318MB. The LPR preliminary results of 60MHz reveals two layers at the depths of ~208m and ~328m, which are considered as the buried regolith layers accumulated during depositional hiatus of mare basalts. The results of 500MHz displays the regolith is about 4-6m, which is consistent with our estimation.