Reprocessed Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) profiles and a Digital Elevation Model (DEM)
Description
The h5 file mla_reprs_77_90_0_360.h5 stores the reprocessed Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) profiles and the python script MLA_reprocessed_profiles_extration.py is the tool to extract the data as dictionaries of pandas dataframes. For the pandas dataframe for each of the profiles, there are a total of 12 columns. "et" is the laser pulse emission time; "chn" denotes the quality flag of the footprint; "tof" is the laser pulse time-of-flight; "offndr" is the off-nadir pointing angle in degree; "orbit" denotes the number of orbit; "spot_ix", "spot_iy", and "spot_iz" denote the inertial coordinates of the footprint in the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) frame centered at the Center-of-Mass of Mercury; "spot_et" is the time of the laser pulse reflection on Mercury's surface; "spot_lat", "spot_lon", and "spot_radius" are the spherical coordinates of the footprint in the body-fixed frame of Mercury. Mla_reprocessed_self_reg_77_84_250m.tif is the digital elevation model (DEM) generated from self-registration of the reprocessed profiles, for the purposes of measuring the tidal deformation of Mercury. Details of the techniques applied to obtain these data products can be found at Xiao, H., Stark, A., Steinbrügge, G. B., Briaud, A., Lara, L. M., & Gutiérrez, P. J. (2024). Mercury's tidal Love number h2 from co-registration of MLA profiles. Authorea Preprints. In Revision with Geophysical Research Letters.