Surface Albedo Variations Across Opportunity’s Traverse in Meridiani Planum

Abstract:

Surface albedo measurements from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity mission can be used to help understand surface-atmosphere interactions at Meridiani Planum. Opportunity has acquired 117 albedo panoramas with the Pancam instrument as of sol 3870, across the first 40 km of its traverse. To date, only the first 32 panoramas have been reported upon in previous studies [1]. Here we present an analysis of the full set of PDS-released albedo observations from Opportunity and correlate our measurements with terrain type and known atmospheric events. To acquire a 360-degree albedo observation, Pancam’s L1 (“clear”) filter is used to take 27 broad-spectrum images, which are stitched into a mosaic. Pancam images are calibrated to reflectance factor (R*), which is taken as an approximation of the Lambertian albedo. Areas of interest are selected and average albedo calculations are applied to all of the selections. Results include the average albedo of each scene, as well as equal-area corrections where applicable, in addition to measurements of specific classes of surface features (e.g., outcrops, dusty terrain, and rover tracks). Average scene albedo measurements range from 0.11 ± 0.04 to 0.30 ± 0.04, with the highest value observed on sol 1290 (immediately after the planet-encircling dust storm of 2007). We compare these results to distance traveled, surface morphologies, local wind driven events, and dust opacity measurements. Future work will focus on correlating Pancam albedo values with orbital data from cameras such as HiRISE, CTX, MOC, THEMIS-VIS, and MARCI, and completion of the same analysis for the full Pancam albedo dataset from Spirit. References: [1] Bell, J. F., III, M. S. Rice, J. R. Johnson, and T. M. Hare (2008), Surface albedo observations at Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum, Mars, J. Geophys. Res., 113, E06S18, doi:10.1029/2007JE002976.