Photometric relief of the previously uninvestigated surface of mercury
Abstract
The results of investigations of the surface relief of Mercury with a classical photometric method are reported. A subject of the photometric method is the intensity of light reflected by the surface of the planet. The main data for the photometric study are the high-resolution images of Mercury received from the MESSENGER space station during its first flyby over Mercury. The images of the surface of Mercury were downloaded from the NASA web-site (http://messenger.jhuapl.edu) and converted to a digital form for photometric measurements. The reflectance characteristics of the surface were calculated according to the model of a three-dimensional scattering phase function (Shevchenko, 1979; 2004a; 2006). From the photometric processing of the space-borne images, the reflectance of four morphologic types of the surface structure of Mercury was determined. With the Hapke model of the bidirectional reflectance (Hapke, 2001), the structural inhomogeneity of the regions of the morphologic forms with centimeter-sized rough-ness was estimated.
- Publication:
-
Solar System Research
- Pub Date:
- January 2014
- DOI:
- 10.1134/S0038094613060075
- Bibcode:
- 2014SoSyR..48....1P