Flight Receivers for Orbital Remote Sensing of Buried Lunar Ice Deposits via CoRaLS: the Cosmic Ray Lunar Sounder

Co-I Ghent will lead the electromagnetic (EM) modeling efforts, and will participate heavily in efforts to ensure flow-down of science requirements to instrument design via modeling results. The design of the CoRaLs payload will be optimized to detect radio signals from buried ice, and to probe and characterize the regolith-bedrock boundary in the lunar polar regions, including those in permanent shadow. This optimization will be completely guided by results of the EM simulations to be conducted throughout the performance period, and will be iterative with those modeling efforts. Co-I Ghent expects to spend roughly half her budgeted time on modeling activities, and half on interpretation and synthesis of modeling results. The latter will be done collaboratively with the other members of the science team, and the science team will interface with the engineering team to develop instrument performance requirements. This phase will result in two planned publications: one on probing the polar regions for ice, and one on the physical properties of the regolith and the nature of its boundary with bedrock.