P41C-2079
Calibration of Mercury Laser Altimeter Data Using Digital Elevation Models Derived from Stereo Image Pairs
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Rebecca Suzanne Bauer, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States, Michael Kenneth Barker, Sigma Space Corporation, Lanham, MD, United States, Erwan Mazarico, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States and Gregory A Neumann, NASA, Baltimore, MD, United States
Abstract:
Knowledge of Mercury’s topography is crucial to understanding Mercury’s complex geology and history, as well as its current rotation state. From onboard the MESSENGER spacecraft, the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) made around 26 million measurements of Mercury’s topography, with radial and horizontal accuracies of ~10 m and ~100 m, respectively. Prior to orbit insertion in 2011, MESSENGER conducted three gravity-assist flybys of Mercury. During the January and October 2008 flybys, MLA made its first altimetric measurements, but the radial and horizontal accuracies were respectively limited to ~100 and ~1000 meters due to uncertainties in the spacecraft and planetary ephemerides. To reduce these geolocation uncertainties, the MLA flyby data have been compared to images taken by the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), another instrument on MESSENGER. Stereo image pairs acquired by MDIS were selected from a database of over 500,000 image pairs located within 5 degrees of the equator. The selected stereo pairs have high surface resolutions (~200 m/pixel), large overlap areas (overlap ratio > 0.3), and well-matched illumination conditions. Using the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline, digital elevation models (DEMs) were constructed from the image pairs that contained MLA flyby data points. We then ran an alignment program on these DEMs to match included MLA altimetry bounce points as closely as possible to the DEM surfaces. The resulting estimated track displacements were aggregated, and the general trends of these displacements can be used to perform a full-flyby orbit adjustment. Such an adjustment would enable more reliable determination of Mercury’s surface elevation and MESSENGER’s trajectory during the 2008 flybys. Accurate elevation measurements from these flybys are especially important because they passed over the southern hemisphere, where MLA coverage from the orbital mission is sparse. Calibration of these MLA data will improve our knowledge of Mercury’s orientation and equatorial topography.
