High-resolution lunar gravity fields from the GRAIL Primary and Extended Missions

Creators: Konopliv, Alex S.; Park, Ryan S.; Yuan, Dah-Ning; Asmar, Sami W.; Watkins, Michael M.; Williams, James G.; Fahnestock, Eugene; Kruizinga, Gerhard; Paik, Meegyeong; Strekalov, Dmitry; Harvey, Nate; Smith, David E.; Zuber, Maria T.

Abstract

The resolution and accuracy of the lunar spherical harmonic gravity field have been dramatically improved as a result of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. From the Primary Mission, previous harmonic gravity fields resulted in an average n = 420 surface resolution and a Bouguer spectrum to n = 330. The GRAIL Extended Mission improves the resolution due to a lower average 23 km altitude orbit. As a result, new harmonic degree 900 gravity fields (GL0900C and GL0900D) show nearly a factor of 2 improvement with an average surface resolution n = 870 and the Bouguer spectrum extended to n = 550. Since the minimum spacecraft altitude varies spatially between 3 km and 23 km, the surface resolution is variable from near n = 680 for the central farside to near n = 900 for the polar regions. These gravity fields with 0.8 million parameters are by far the highest-degree fields of any planet ever estimated with a fully dynamic least squares technique using spacecraft tracking data.

Additional Information

The research described in this paper was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We gratefully acknowledge the use of the Ames Pleiades Supercomputer that was used to generate the gravity solutions of this paper. We thank Mark Wieczorek for providing the equivalent gravity from topography harmonic field that is used in this paper. We appreciate Terry Sabaka directing us on the techniques of generating gravity errors using clone fields from the covariance matrix. Data used to generate the results of this paper are available at http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu. The Editor thanks two anonymous reviewers for their assistance in evaluating this paper.

Attached Files

Published - Geophysical_Research_Letters_-_2014_-_Konopliv_-_High‐resolution_lunar_gravity_fields_from_the_GRAIL_Primary_and_Extended.pdf

Files

Geophysical_Research_Letters_-_2014_-_Konopliv_-_High‐resolution_lunar_gravity_fields_from_the_GRAIL_Primary_and_Extended.pdf

Files (3.7 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
Geophysical_Research_Letters_-_2014_-_Konopliv_-_High‐resolution_lunar_gravity_fields_from_the_GRAIL_Primary_and_Extended.pdf md5:0e5f8dd439aa212d6bbb2088798a5838	3.7 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes