London Meeting, April 1998 - home page
Mars MGS MOLA global geodetic control
network
T.C. Duxbury, D.E. Smith, M.T. Zuber, H.V. Frey, J.B. Garvin, J.W.
Head, D.O. Muhleman, G.H. Pettengill, R.J. Phillips, S.C. Solomon, H.J.
Zwally, W.B. Banerdt & C.H. Acton
(charles.h.acton@jpl.nasa.gov)
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099,
U.S.A.
The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the Mars Global Surveyor
(MGS) mission will produce a precision global geodetic control network
for Mars of 30,000 - 50,000 points which will be accurate to 500m (3
sigma) in planer coordinates and 100m (3 sigma) in radius. Precision
orbits, produced from long arc spacecraft doppler tracking to improve
the Mars gravity field, together with spacecraft attitude, MOLA
alignment parameters and the MOLA ranging points are being combined
with the existing Viking Mars Digital Image Maps (MDIMs - E. Eliason,
USGS) to produce accurate 3 dimensional coordinates of surface features
using the MOLA ranging observations to identify feature crossings and
the MDIMs to translate the feature crossing to the center of the
feature. A special MOLA / MDIM image product (mogal) is being produced
which contains a small image strip surrounding the MOLA ground track
and a plot of the MOLA-derived radii data to enable the correlation
between altimetry and image. The mogal production process and the
extraction process of geodetic control points will be described.
Extra-terrestrial
Mapping Home Page
Comments to Dr. Randy Kirk
This page updated: 28 January, 2002, by Mark
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