Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter
The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected more than 5 billion measurements in the nominal 50 km orbit over ~10,000 orbits. The data precision, geodetic accuracy, and spatial distribution enable two-dimensional crossovers to be used to...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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American Geophysical Union (AGU)
2015
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97925 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2652-8017 |
| _version_ | 1826207170680586240 |
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| author | Mazarico, Erwan Matias Barker, Michael K. Neumann, Gregory A. Zuber, Maria Smith, David Edmund |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Mazarico, Erwan Matias Barker, Michael K. Neumann, Gregory A. Zuber, Maria Smith, David Edmund |
| author_sort | Mazarico, Erwan Matias |
| collection | MIT |
| description | The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected more than 5 billion measurements in the nominal 50 km orbit over ~10,000 orbits. The data precision, geodetic accuracy, and spatial distribution enable two-dimensional crossovers to be used to infer relative radial position corrections between tracks to better than ~1 m. We use nearly 500,000 altimetric crossovers to separate remaining high-frequency spacecraft trajectory errors from the periodic radial surface tidal deformation. The unusual sampling of the lunar body tide from polar lunar orbit limits the size of the typical differential signal expected at ground track intersections to ~10 cm. Nevertheless, we reliably detect the topographic tidal signal and estimate the associated Love number h[subscript 2] to be 0.0371 ± 0.0033, which is consistent with but lower than recent results from lunar laser ranging. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:45:09Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/97925 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:45:09Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | American Geophysical Union (AGU) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/979252022-09-28T15:54:30Z Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter Mazarico, Erwan Matias Barker, Michael K. Neumann, Gregory A. Zuber, Maria Smith, David Edmund Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Mazarico, Erwan Matias Zuber, Maria Smith, David Edmund The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected more than 5 billion measurements in the nominal 50 km orbit over ~10,000 orbits. The data precision, geodetic accuracy, and spatial distribution enable two-dimensional crossovers to be used to infer relative radial position corrections between tracks to better than ~1 m. We use nearly 500,000 altimetric crossovers to separate remaining high-frequency spacecraft trajectory errors from the periodic radial surface tidal deformation. The unusual sampling of the lunar body tide from polar lunar orbit limits the size of the typical differential signal expected at ground track intersections to ~10 cm. Nevertheless, we reliably detect the topographic tidal signal and estimate the associated Love number h[subscript 2] to be 0.0371 ± 0.0033, which is consistent with but lower than recent results from lunar laser ranging. United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NNX09AM53G) United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NNG09HP18C) 2015-07-31T11:59:21Z 2015-07-31T11:59:21Z 2014-04 2013-12 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 00948276 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97925 Mazarico, Erwan, Michael K. Barker, Gregory A. Neumann, Maria T. Zuber, and David E. Smith. “Detection of the Lunar Body Tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter.” Geophysical Research Letters 41, no. 7 (April 4, 2014): 2282–2288. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2652-8017 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2013gl059085 Geophysical Research Letters Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ application/pdf American Geophysical Union (AGU) American Geophysical Union |
| spellingShingle | Mazarico, Erwan Matias Barker, Michael K. Neumann, Gregory A. Zuber, Maria Smith, David Edmund Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter |
| title | Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter |
| title_full | Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter |
| title_fullStr | Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter |
| title_full_unstemmed | Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter |
| title_short | Detection of the lunar body tide by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter |
| title_sort | detection of the lunar body tide by the lunar orbiter laser altimeter |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97925 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2652-8017 |
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