Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 1994
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994aas...185.4313d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 185th AAS Meeting, #43.13; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 26, p.1376
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Ground based S-band radar observations of Mercury show a group of features in the northern and southern polar regions with highly depolarized radar echoes. These features are coincident with the positions of known craters and thought to be water ice deposits on the permanently shadowed floors of the craters (Harmon, et al., 1994, Nature, 369, 213). A byproduct of the discovery of these small features is an improved determination of the direction of Mercury's rotation axis. Twenty-seven separate radar images taken from the Arecibo Observatory in the summers of 1991 and 1992 are in a correct viewing geometry to resolve the northern polar region. The direction of the rotation axis of Mercury has been determined to higher precision than possible from previous observations by minimizing the motion of these features relative to the latitude longitude coordinate system through perturbations of the axis direction. One source of error is the apparent motion of these features caused by changing crater floor illumination due to the different viewing geometries of the observations. This has been modeled and a correction has been applied to the results of the axis perturbation technique, resulting in a rotation axis direction of RA(1950) 281.7deg +/-0.7deg , Declination 61.6deg +/-0.3deg .
de Vries Christopher H.
Harmon John K.
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