High‐resolution local gravity model of the south pole of the Moon from GRAIL extended mission data

Goossens, Sander; Sabaka, Terence J.; Nicholas, J. B.; Lemoine, F. G.; Rowlands, D. D.; Mazarico, E.; Neumann, Gregory A.; Smith, David E.; Zuber, M. T.

doi:10.1002/2014gl060178

Cited by 17 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The details of their derivation are given in Table 1. Moreover, based on the GRAIL mission, many local solutions for lunar gravity fields have also been derived (Goossens et al 2020(Goossens et al , 2018(Goossens et al , 2014.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A degree-100 lunar gravity model from the Chang’e 5T1 mission

Yan

Liu

Xiao

et al. 2020

A&A

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Context. Chinese lunar missions have grown in number over the last ten years, with an increasing focus on radio science investigations. In previous work, we estimated two lunar gravity field models, CEGM01 and CEGM02. The recently lunar mission, Chang’e 5T1, which had an orbital inclination between 18 and 68 degrees, and collected orbital tracking data continually for two years, made an improved gravity field model possible. Aims. Our aim was to estimate a new lunar gravity field model up to degree and order 100, CEGM03, and a new tidal Love number based on the Chang’e 5T1 tracking data combined with the historical tracking data used in the solution of CEGM02. The new model makes use of tracking data with this particular inclination, which has not been used in previous gravity field modeling. Methods. The solution for this new model was based on our in-house software, LUGREAS. The gravity spectrum power, post-fit residuals after precision orbit determination (POD), lunar surface gravity anomalies, correlations between parameters, admittance and coherence with topography model, and accuracy of POD were analyzed to validate the new CEGM03 model. Results. We analyzed the tracking data of the Chang’e 5T1 mission and estimated the CEGM03 lunar gravity field model. We found that the two-way Doppler measurement accuracy reached 0.2 mm s−1 with 10 s integration time. The error spectrum shows that the formal error for CEGM03 was at least reduced by about 2 times below the harmonic degree of 20, when compared to the CEGM02 model. The admittance and correlation of gravity and topography was also improved when compared to the correlations for the CEGM02 model. The lunar potential Love number k2 was estimated to be 0.02430±0.0001 (ten times the formal error). Conclusions. From the model analysis and comparison of the various models, we identified improvements in the CEGM03 model after introducing Chang’e 5T1 tracking data. Moreover, this study illustrates how the low and middle inclination orbits could contribute better accuracy for a low degree of lunar gravity field.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A degree-100 lunar gravity model from the Chang’e 5T1 mission

Yan

Liu

Xiao

et al. 2020

A&A

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“…Other objectives, such as gravity field estimation, are possible with the same tools and techniques, but are outside of the scope of this work. The recent Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory mission (GRAIL;Zuber et al, 2013a,b) resulted in high-resolution gravity models (Lemoine et al, 2013(Lemoine et al, , 2014Goossens et al, 2014), which largely supersede what can be achieved with the lower-quality tracking data gathered by LRO and previous orbiters. We use the orbit determination and geodetic parameter estimation software GEODYN, developed and maintained at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orbit determination of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: Status after seven years

Mazarico

Neumann

Barker

et al. 2018

Planetary and Space Science

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The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been orbiting the Moon since 2009, obtaining unique and foundational datasets important to understanding the evolution of the Moon and the Solar System. The high-resolution data acquired by LRO benefit from precise orbit determination (OD), limiting the need for geolocation and co-registration tasks. The initial position knowledge requirement (50 meters) was met with radio tracking from ground stations, after combination with LOLA altimetric crossovers. LRO-specific gravity field solutions were determined and allowed radio-only OD to perform at the level of 20 meters, although secular inclination changes required frequent updates. The high-accuracy gravity fields from GRAIL, with <10 km spatial resolution, further improved the radio-only orbit reconstruction quality (<10 meters). However, orbit reconstruction is in part limited by the 0.3-0.5 mm/s measurement noise level in S-band tracking. One-way tracking through Laser Ranging can supplement the tracking available for OD with 28-Hz ranges with 20-cm single-shot precision, but is available only on the nearside (the lunar hemisphere facing the Earth due to tidal locking). Here, we report on the status of the OD effort since the beginning of the mission, a period spanning more than seven years. We describe modeling improvements and the use of new measurements. In particular, the LOLA altimetric data give accurate, uniform, and independent information about LRO's orbit, with a different sensitivity and geometry which includes coverage over the lunar farside and is not tied to ground-based assets. With SLDEM2015 (a combination of the LOLA topographic profiles and the Kaguya Terrain Camera stereo images), another use of altimetry is possible for OD. We extend the 'direct altimetry' technique developed for the ICESat mission to perform OD and adjust spacecraft position to minimize discrepancies between LOLA tracks and SLDEM2015. Comparisons with the radio-only orbits are used to evaluate this new tracking type, of interest for the OD of future

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“…In this presentation, we restrict the numerical experiments to k = 0 and 1 for brevity. The corresponding quantities, i.e., the disturbing gravitational potential T 0 and its first radial derivative T 1 , are used in regional studies (e.g., Sugano and Heki, 2004;Goossens et al, 2014;Tenzer et al, 2018).…”

Section: Numerical Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a consequence, regional approaches have been applied to attempt to improve lunar GFMs over the nearside (Sugano and Heki, 2004;Goossens et al, 2005a,b;Han, 2008;Han et al, 2009Han et al, , 2011. Besides the most recent GFMs do not suffer from heterogeneous data coverage, improvements by local methods are still possible, as shown by Goossens et al (2012Goossens et al ( , 2014 over the South Pole-Aitken basin on the farside. Regional modelling may also be attractive for practical reasons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integral inversion of GRAIL inter-satellite gravitational accelerations for regional recovery of the lunar gravitational field

Šprlák

Han

Featherstone

2020

Advances in Space Research

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We present an integral-based approach for high-resolution regional recovery of the gravitational field in this article. We derive rigorous remove-compute-restore integral estimators relating the line-of-sight gravitational acceleration to an arbitrary order radial derivative of the gravitational potential. The integral estimators are composed of three terms, i.e., the truncated integration, the low-frequency line-of-sight gravitational acceleration, and the high-frequency truncation error (effect of the distant zones). We test the accuracy of the integral transformations and of the integral estimators in a closed-loop simulation over the Montes Jura region on the nearside of the Moon. In this way, we determine optimal sizes of integration radii and grid discretisation. In addition, we investigate the performance of the regional integral inversion with synthetic and realistic GRAIL observations. We demonstrate that the regional inversion results of the disturbing gravitational potential and its first order radial derivative in the Montes Jura mountain range are less contaminated by high-frequency noise than the global spherical harmonic models.

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High‐resolution local gravity model of the south pole of the Moon from GRAIL extended mission data

Cited by 17 publications

References 39 publications

A degree-100 lunar gravity model from the Chang’e 5T1 mission

A degree-100 lunar gravity model from the Chang’e 5T1 mission

Orbit determination of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: Status after seven years

Integral inversion of GRAIL inter-satellite gravitational accelerations for regional recovery of the lunar gravitational field

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