Compiling Mercury relief map using several data sources

Abstract:

There are several data of Mercury topography obtained as the result of processing materials collected by two spacecraft – the Mariner-10 and the MESSENGER during their Mercury flybys.
The history of the visual mapping of Mercury begins at the recent times as the first significant observations were made during the latter half of the 20th century, whereas today we have no data with 100% coverage of the entire surface of the Mercury except the global mosaic composed of the images acquired by MESSENGER.
The main objective of this work is to provide the first Mercury relief map using all the existing elevation data. The workflow included collecting, combining and processing the existing data and afterwards merging them correctly for one single map compiling. The preference was given to topography data while the global mosaic was used to fill the gaps where there was insufficient topography.
The Mercury relief map has been created with the help of four different types of data:
- global mosaic with 100% coverage of Mercury's surface created from Messenger orbital images (36% of the final map);
- Digital Terrain Models obtained by the treating stereo images made during the Mariner 10's flybys (15% of the map) (Cook and Robinson, 2000);
- Digital Terrain Models obtained from images acquired during the Messenger flybys (24% of the map) (F. Preusker et al., 2011);
- the data sets produced by the MESSENGER Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) (25 % of the map).
The final map is created in the Lambert azimuthal Equal area projection and has the scale 1:18 000 000. It represents two hemispheres – western and eastern which are separated by the zero meridian. It mainly shows the hypsometric features of the planet and сraters with a diameter more than 200 kilometers.