Low-Frequency Electromagnetic Sounding for Planetary Volatiles (Invited)

EM sounding is divided by loss tangent << 1 (surface-penetrating radars) and >> 1 (inductive methods). The former have high resolution and responses dominated by dielectric permittivity. They have been useful for sounding the polar caps of Mars and are very promising to image the shells of icy satellites as well as the uppermost crusts of silicate bodies. The latter have poorer resolution but greater penetration depth, responses dominated by electrical conductivity, and are the subject of this talk. Low-frequency inductive methods are further divided by comparing the source-receiver separation to the skin depth. Large separations are parametric in frequency so that the variation of EM response with frequency is translated to change in conductivity with depth. Parametric soundings can exploit natural sources from the solar wind, magnetosphere, ionosphere, or atmosphere. Small source-sensor separations are geometric with transmitter-receiver positions: both conductivity and permittivity can be recovered as a function of frequency (a dielectric spectrum), but at greater resource requirements. Subsurface liquid water is an optimal low-frequency EM target because even small quantities of dissolved ions make it a powerful electrical conductor compared to dry, resistive, silicate crusts. Water at kms or even tens of kms can be detected using the magnetotelluric, geomagnetic-depth sounding, or wave-tilt methods: these are all natural-source soundings using different combinations of field components and receiver geometries. If natural sources are weak or absent, a transmitter can be used to obtain high SNR; the time-domain EM (TDEM) method has been used extensively for terrestrial groundwater exploration. Using a ballistically deployed 200-m diameter transmitter loop, TDEM can detect groundwater at depths of several km. If landed in a region of strong local crustal magnetism, the characteristic Larmor frequency of liquid water can be detected with a TDEM-like setup using nuclear magnetic resonance. This is a unique measurement for liquid water but is likely limited to <100 m depth. Water ice is generally indistinct geophysically, but measurement of the mHz-MHz dielectric spectrum reveals distinct signatures: the artificial-source geometric-soundings can likely map ice at depths up to 10 m and are discussed in a companion presentation. Systems for natural- and artificial-source, parametric and geometric low-frequency EM soundings have been developed by various groups to TRL 4+ and are expected to require modest resources (several kg, W) for robotic missions.