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Crater-Associated Radar-Dark Diffuse Features

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms

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Definition

An extended surface feature associated with an impact crater and appearing on radar images as a dark area with diffuse boundaries.

Description

A dark feature in close association with an impact crater on Venus that appears on radar images. The radar-dark area generally extends from tens to hundreds of km beyond the blocky continuous ejecta which is radar bright. Radar-dark diffuse features (DDFs) were identified in the side-looking radar backscatter cross-sectional images obtained with the synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Some DDFs have a prominent planform of a radar-dark parabola open to the west. Circular radar-dark annuli around some large craters are also observed on the Moon and Mercury, although the specific term DDF is not commonly applied to them.

Subtypes (Venus)

Emissivity parabola (detected by radiometric measurements).

Radar-dark diffuse features (DDFs) subtypes (Basilevsky and Head 2006) in increasing age (Fig. 1):

  1. (1)

    Radar dark parabola(13.9 % of craters...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California – Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Nataliya Bondarenko

Authors
  1. Nataliya Bondarenko
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Correspondence to Nataliya Bondarenko .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Ames Research Center/NPP, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Henrik Hargitai

  2. Konkoly Thege Miklos Astronomical Institute, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Ákos Kereszturi

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Bondarenko, N. (2015). Crater-Associated Radar-Dark Diffuse Features. In: Hargitai, H., Kereszturi, Á. (eds) Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3134-3_450

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