Design of a Subsurface Radar Sounder for Venus Exploration

Satellite measurements in the recent past have significantly improved our understanding of the interaction of the Sun with planetary atmospheres, particularly with those of lunar and Mars. Such an understanding for Venus, however, is lacking mainly due to the limited spacecraft measurements. One of the major gaps in the Venus exploration is the rate of resurfacing, their cause, their extents, and whether their past environments are preserved below the resurfaced crust or not is yet to be understood. The framing of geological time scale for Venus remains to be deciphered. In this paper, we propose a space-borne GPR as a first-of-its-kind instrument to be flown in future Venus mission in order to gather information regarding the shallow subsurface (up to a depth of $\sim 100$ s of meters) of the Venus.