Kristian Chan

PS Planetary and Solar System Sciences

The 2023 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Kristian Chan for the poster/PICO entitled:

RIME-REASON Synergistic Opportunities for Surface and Near-surface Investigations of Icy Moons (Chan, K.; Grima, C.; Gerekos, C.; Blankenship, D. D.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Kristian Chan is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, Jackson School of Geosciences, Institute for Geophysics, supervised by Cyril Grima and Don Blankenship. The focus of his research centers on the development and application of techniques for multifrequency/bandwidth ice-penetrating radar data to investigate the near-surface heterogeneity of Jupiter’s icy moons Europa and Ganymede. His work incorporates the use of radar models and data collected over terrestrial analogs (e.g., firn) in the Arctic and Antarctica.

Kristian received this award for his presentation on how RIME and REASON, two icepenetrating radars aboard ESA’s Juice and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions, respectively, can be used together for detecting and characterizing regions with near-surface layering while isolating the effects of surface roughness. For example, this could be achieved at flyby intersections where the two radars observe with the same center frequency but different bandwidths. Applications of this approach to future observations could provide insight into processes that alter the near-surface environment of these icy moons, such as the refreezing of brines in ice regolith or mass wasting, resulting in layered deposits across various spatial scales.