Lessons From Marius Hills Pit Analog Tests of EchoQuilt

Marius Hills analog tests of EchoQuilt against SELENE radar constraints and GRAIL gravity signatures revealed four lessons that reshape how we validate pit-adjacent tube quilts.

The Marius Hills Hole is the closest thing planetary science has to a confirmed lunar lava tube entry, and it is also the hardest analog target the EchoQuilt team has tested against. The Wiley GRL paper by Kaku et al. on detection of intact lava tubes at Marius Hills via SELENE/Kaguya LRS laid out the radar echo pattern evidence for a roughly 50 km intact tube, and the ISAS JAXA topic on detection of intact lunar lava tubes via SELENE radar confirmed the finding from JAXA's own analysis path. The Wiley GRL paper on evidence of large empty lava tubes on the Moon using GRAIL gravity corroborates the result with an independent gravity-signature line of evidence.