Bright prospects for radar detection of Europa's ocean

The surface of Europa has been hypothesized to include an ice regolith layer from hundreds of meters to kilometers in thickness. However, contrary to previous claims, it does not present a significant obstacle to searching for Europa's ocean with radar sounding. This note corrects prior volume scattering loss analyses and expands them to includes observational and thermo-mechanical constraints on pore size and regolith depth. This provides a more physically realistic range of potential ice-regolith volume-scattering losses for radar sounding observations of Europa's ice shell in the HF and VHF frequency bands. We conclude that, for the range of physical processes and material properties observed or hypothesized for Europa, volume scattering losses are not likely to pose a major obstacle to radar penetration. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.