Correlations Between In Situ and Remotely Sensed Magnetic Anomalies on the Lunar Prospector Mission

Details Correlations Between In Situ and Remotely Sensed Magnetic Anomalies on the Lunar Prospector Mission Correlations Between In Situ and Remotely Sensed Magnetic Anomalies on the Lunar Prospector Mission

May 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agusmgp42a..02d&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2002, abstract #GP42A-02

Other

0925 Magnetic And Electrical Methods, 0933 Remote Sensing, 1517 Magnetic Anomaly Modeling, 1545 Spatial Variations (All Harmonics And Anomalies), 1594 Instruments And Techniques

Scientific paper

The Lunar Prospector mission provides two complementary measurements of Lunar magnetic fields. The magnetometer (MAG) measures the vector magnetic field at the spacecraft position, while estimates of the magnetic field strength at the Lunar surface are derived remotely using the electron reflectometer (ER) measurements of the electron loss cone angle. In this work we study correlations between these two data sets with several goals in mind. First, since the ER instrument depends on some knowledge of the electron trajectories in order to determine the magnetic field footprint on the surface, we wish to assess the importance of strong magnetic field curvature in the determination of the location of the reflection points measured by the ER. Second, we wish to explore the utility of using the ER data as a lower boundary condition for models attempting to downward extend the magnetic field topology as measured by the MAG instrument on the spacecraft. Initial results using well isolated anomalies in areas such as Reiner Gamma and the Apollo 16 landing site indicate that for strong anomalies (~50 nT at 20-30 km altitude) corrections to the electron reflection points may be on the order of 1 degree in latitude or longitude at the surface. The magnetic fields of these sites and other similar examples were modeled using a simple magnetic dipole approximation. Sites with a more complex magnetic topology such as the Crisium antipode may be too difficult to model with a simple collection of dipoles as the run times for fitting routines increases dramatically. Spherical Cap Harmonic Analysis (SCHA) may be an appropriate tool to model these larger regional anomalies, and we discuss the possibility of using the ER data as a lower boundary condition at the surface for this technique. The end goal of our work is to remove at least some of the ambiguities inherent in any downward extension of orbital magnetometer data, using a synthesis of the in situ magnetic field data measured from orbit and ER estimates of the actual surface fields.

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