Towards Regional Lunar Gravity Fields Using Lunar Prospector Extended Mission Data - Simulations and Results

Until this date, the lunar gravimetric inverse problem has mainly been posed as a global problem, solving for gravity fields over the whole of the Moon. The asymmetric sampling of the force field requires that some sort of regularisation be applied in order to have a meaningful global solution that does not provide spurious information on the far side. On one hand these global solutions work very well in terms of overall orbit quality and consistency, despite the fact that roughly one half of the surface lacks sampling. On the other hand, excellently sampled regions cannot be determined at maximum spatial resolution without affecting too much the solution on the far side, which in itself is highly unstable. Since the Lunar Prospector mission, there are many of such excellently sampled regions on the near side of the Moon. In order to exhaust the information present in the tracking data of this satellite, regional methods for solving the gravity field of well-sampled areas become interesting. We present a method to extract regional gravity information from Doppler and Range tracking of the Lunar Prospector spacecraft. The method incorporates the GEODYN II software package for tracking data processing and orbit determination, and a software package to analyse the residuals from the orbit determination process, and to transform these residuals into gravity anomalies on the lunar surface by means of a Stokes method. Simulations will show how well a gravity signal in the residuals can be recovered. Results from orbit determination using 20 days of Lunar Prospector Extended Mission data will be shown, to demonstrate the readiness of the method to process real-life satellite data. With missions in the future such as SELENE, which will provide the first global tracking data set of the Moon ever, global and regional methods to solve for gravity field products will remain equally of interest, since they both can give complementary insight into the low and high resolution gravity field. Regional methods can not only be used to investigate non-uniformly sampled force fields, they can also provide a localisation at higher resolution in the space domain. The method presented here can be extended to other celestial bodies of interest in planetary geodesy.