London Meeting, April 1998 - home page
Precision cartographic mapping
of the Pathfinder landing site
Thomas C. Duxbury
(tduxbury@mail1.jpl.nasa.gov),
to be presented by C.H. Acton
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099,
U.S.A.
Viking Orbiter images were reprocessed using new techniques to produce
a precision controlled, photomosaic map of the Mars Pathfinder landing
site prior to landing. The difference between the Mars-fixed
coordinates of the lander as determined from the precision cartographic
map product and that determined from earth-based radio tracking of the
lander (Folkner, 1997) are essentially zero, within the accuracy of the
radio tracking solution. The precision cartographic map product was
produced from measuring a totally new control network of 586 points,
local to the landing site, observed in 50 Viking Orbiter images.
Mars-fixed areocentric coordinates of latitude, longitude and radius
for each control point together with special camera pointing parameters
and orbit parameters were estimated in the block adjustment, typically
not estimated in previous cartographic efforts. Convergence angles of
typically 40 deg and as large as 90 deg for the control points were
achieved in the highly over determined system of observations. No tie
was made to the nearby Viking 1 landing site and special data weighting
was employed to produce the map which was tied to the digital terrain
model derived from the dense control network.
Extra-terrestrial
Mapping Home Page
Comments to Dr. Randy Kirk
This page updated: 28 January, 2002, by Mark
Rosiek
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