Reference Frames Of Mercury After MESSENGER

Alexander Stark, Jürgen Oberst, Frank Preusker, Steffi Burmeister, Gregor Steinbrügge, Hauke Hussmann
(Submitted on 26 Oct 2017)

We report on recent refinements and the current status for the rotational state models and the reference frame of the planet Mercury.

We summarize the performed measurements of Mercury rotation based on terrestrial radar observations as well as data from the Mariner 10 and the MESSENGER missions. Further, we describe the different available definitions of reference systems for Mercury, which are realized using data obtained by instruments on board MESSENGER.

In particular, we discuss the dynamical frame, the principal-axes frame, the ellipsoid frame, as well as the cartographic frame. We also describe the reference frame adopted by the MESSENGER science team for the release of their cartographic products and we provide expressions for transformations from this frame to the other reference frames.

Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as:    arXiv:1710.09686 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1710.09686v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Alexander Stark
[v1] Thu, 26 Oct 2017 13:29:07 GMT (3210kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09686