With global warming, supraglacial lakes play an important role in ice sheet stability and climate change. They are not only the main factors affecting mass balance and sea-level rise but also the key units of surface runoff storage and mass loss. To automatically map the spatiotemporal distribution of supraglacial lakes in Greenland, this paper proposes an attention-based U-Net model with Sentinel-1 SAR imagery. The extraction results show that compared with the traditional network, this method obtains a higher validation coefficient, with an F1 score of 0.971, and it is spatiotemporally transferable, able to realize the extraction of supraglacial lakes in complex areas without ignoring small lakes. In addition, we conducted a case study in the Jakobshavn region and found that the supraglacial lake area peaked in advance between spring and summer due to extreme melting events from 2017 to 2021. Meanwhile, the supraglacial lakes near the 79°N Glacier tended to expand inland during the melting season.

The Moon provides a long-term, stable, and unique location for Earth observation. Several space agencies, such as NASA, ESA, and CNSA, have conducted lunar explorations. To build a Moon-based observation station, site selection is the first step. The time coverage of Earth observation, e.g., the whole Earth disc observation or Earth-related plasmasphere and magnetosphere, the duration of sunlight coverage, and topography (i.e., slope) are the three major factors influencing site selection, especially in the Moon’s south pole region. In this study, we used the Chang’E digital elevation model (DEM) together with Earth, Moon, and Sun positions deduced from JPL ephemeris for site selection. Two craters, Faustini and Shoemaker, were chosen for the fuzzy evaluation of these three factors based on a multiple-input single-output (MISO) model during a 19-year period. The results show that the edge regions of craters and small hills, potholes, or uplifts inside craters are unsuitable for a Moon-based observation station. The south pole area, including these two craters, has relatively low time coverage of sunlight and some unevenly distributed, permanent shadow areas. This indicates a low thermal environment for radiation protection, whereas the relatively flat topography and the ability to cover a field of view several times the Earth’s radius enable observations of the plasmasphere and magnetosphere.

With the rapid development of Earth system science, a new understanding of the complete Earth system has highlighted the crucial importance of integrated observations, especially in research involving large-scale geoscience phenomena. As an active sensor with all-time and all-weather capabilities, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely used in recent decades for Earth observation. However, the existing spaceborne, airborne, and ground-based SAR systems have difficulty providing temporally consistent and spatially continuous Earth observation data on a global scale. As Earth’s only natural satellite, the Moon is a very promising Earth observation platform. By deploying a transmitter on the Moon and a receiver on the high-orbit satellite, a Moon-based/spaceborne bistatic synthetic aperture radar (MS-BiSAR) can be formed. In this paper, the MS-BiSAR geometric model of Earth observation was established using ephemeris and orbit propagators with reference system transformations, and three different MS-BiSAR configurations were used to calculate and analyze their geometric characteristics and Earth observation coverage. The results show that with the advantage of wide swaths, continuous observation capabilities, and large coverage, such an MS-BiSAR could significantly contribute to monitoring and understanding large-scale geoscience phenomena.

To address the challenge of achieving both temporal consistency and spatial continuity in Earth observation data of polar regions, this paper proposes an innovative concept of Moon-based/Highly Elliptical Orbit (HEO) Spaceborne Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar (MH-BiSAR), with transmitters on the Moon and receivers on HEO satellites. By utilizing ephemeris data and an orbit propagator, this study explores MH-BiSAR’s geometric coverage capabilities in polar regions and conducts a preliminary analysis of its characteristics. The findings reveal that MH-BiSAR could provide continuous multi-day revisit observations of polar regions within each sidereal month, presenting a significant advantage for monitoring high-dynamic and large-scale scientific phenomena, such as polar sea ice observations. This innovative observational method offers a new perspective for polar monitoring and is expected to deepen our understanding of polar phenomena.

Nowadays, the Earth observation based on the Moon has attracted attention from many researchers and relevant departments. There also exists a considerable amount of interest in monitoring large-scale and long-term geoscience phenomena using the Moon-based SAR (MBS). However, the Earth’s observation from MBS has long transmission time, and the relative motion of MBS with its Earth ground target (EGT) is much different to the space-borne SAR, the above reasons indicate that the traditional stop-and-go model is no longer suitable for MBS in frequency domain imaging. Here a dual-path separate calculation method for single pulse is presented in this paper for a better match of a real scenario, and then the slant range is fitted to a high-order polynomial series. The MBS’s location, the synthetic aperture time and other factors have effects on length of the dual- path and fit bias. Without thoroughly investigated phase de-correlation processing in frequency domain, and to avoid computational costs in traditional back-projection (BP) algorithm, the paper first proposes a fast back-projection (FBP) algorithm in time domain for MBS, a platform that has long transmission time and long synthetic aperture time. In the FBP algorithm, the original method, that projected echo on all pixels in the imaging area, is changed to projected echo on a centerline instead. A suitable interpolation for points on the centerline is adopted to reduce the projected error; the synthetic aperture length and imaging area are also divided into subsections to reduce computation cost. The formula indicates that the range error could be control once the product of sub-imaging area’s length and sub-aperture’s length stay constant. Through the theoretical analysis, the detailed range difference mainly at apogee, perigee, ascending, and descending nodes indicate the necessity to separately calculate the dual-path for MBS’s single pulse transmission in Earth-Moon motion, with real ephemeris been adopted; then, the high-order polynomial fitting will better describe the motion trajectory. Lastly, the FBP algorithm proposed is simulated in a specific scenario under acceptable resolution, and the result shows its feasibility for image compression.