Radar evidence of subglacial liquid water on Mars.

The presence of liquid water at the base of the martian polar caps has long been suspected but not observed. We surveyed the Planum Australe region using the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) instrument, a low-frequency radar on the Mars Express spacecraft. Radar profiles collected between May 2012 and December 2015 contain evidence of liquid water trapped below the ice of the South Polar Layered Deposits. Anomalously bright subsurface reflections are evident within a well-defined, 20-kilometer-wide zone centered at 193°E, 81°S, which is surrounded by much less reflective areas. Quantitative analysis of the radar signals shows that this bright feature has high relative dielectric permittivity (>15), matching that of water-bearing materials. We interpret this feature as a stable body of liquid water on Mars.

Reconstructing the contour of metallic planar objects from only intensity scattered field data over a single plane.

The inverse scattering problem of recovering the contour of planar metallic scattering objects from only the amplitude of the scattered field is considered. A two step reconstruction procedure is proposed: first the phase of the scattered field is retrieved by solving a phase retrieval problem; then the objects' supports are reconstructed from the retrieved scattered field. Differently form previous approaches, here the amplitude of the scattered field is assumed known over a single plane in near zone but at two different frequencies. In this way, while the frequency diversity increases the number of independent data, relevant for ensuring the reliability of the phase retrieval stage, to perform measurements on a single plane allows some practical advantages. Numerical results show the performances achievable by the proposed reconstruction scheme with respect to the local minima problem and the stability against the noise on data.

Frequency-domain approach to distributed fiber-optic Brillouin sensing.

A novel approach to distributed fiber-optic Brillouin sensing is presented and numerically analyzed. An integral equation that directly relates the Brillouin gain to the Brillouin signal is derived in the frequency domain, and from this result a new technique for the quantitative reconstruction of temperature-strain profiles along an optical fiber is developed. We achieve the reconstruction by minimizing a cost function that represents the error between the measured and the model data. We effectively perform such a minimization by representing the unknown (temperature-strain) profile with a finite number of parameters. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its stability against noise in the data.

In-depth resolution for a strip source in the Fresnel zone.

The problem of determining the achievable resolution limits in the reconstruction of a current distribution is considered. The analysis refers to the one-dimensional, scalar case of a rectilinear, bounded electric current distribution when data are collected by measurement of the radiated field over a finite rectilinear observation domain located in the Fresnel zone, orthogonal and centered with respect to the source. The investigation is carried out by means of analytical singular-value decomposition of the radiation operator connecting data and unknown, which is made possible by the introduction of suitable scalar products in both the unknown and data spaces. This strategy permits the use of the results concerning prolate spheroidal wave functions described by B. R. Frieden [Progress in Optics Vol. IX, E. Wolf, ed. (North-Holland, Amsterdam 1971), p. 311.] For values of the space-bandwidth product much larger than 1, the steplike behavior of the singular values reveals that the inverse problem is severely ill posed. This, in turn, makes it mandatory to use regularization to obtain a stable solution and suggests a regularization scheme based on a truncated singular-value decomposition. The task of determining the depth-resolving power is accomplished with resort to Rayleigh's criterion, and the effect of the geometrical parameters of the measurement configuration is also discussed.