MER 2003 Landing Site Thermal Inertia

Working with Landing Site Thermal Inertia Values from the TES Database

The following discussion is a brief guide to the thermal inertia maps that are being distributed to the MER landing site community. For more details, contact Shannon Pelkey, Bruce Jakosky, or Mike Mellon (all at University of Colorado).

We are making thermal inertia maps of all of the potential landing sites available to the landing site working group in advance of general release in order to facilitate appropriate evaluation and discussion. These maps represent substantial effort on our part beyond what is included in the released data. This effort includes selection of data and evaluation of atmospheric conditions, and mapping and alignment of data, which are not trivial tasks. In addition, the maps include data that have not yet been released to the science community. We are in the process of analyzing the maps ourselves, and will present and publish the results in a timely manner. Therefore, we request that you use these maps only for analyses related to landing site selection and validation, and that you not publish the results or present them at science meetings without our advance agreement. Of course, analyses that are done independently utilizing the released data are under no such restriction.

DATA AND ANALYSIS DESCRIPTION

The thermal-inertia values in these maps are derived from TES nighttime bolometric- brightness-temperature observations. For a complete discussion of the derivation procedure and error analysis, see Mellon et al. (2000). The data used in creating these maps came from TES orbits 1583-4198, 5411-10126, covering the majority of the primary mapping mission; the gap eliminates orbits where the daytime infrared dust opacity was greater than 0.2.

We have produced eleven thermal-inertia maps, which, between them, include the approximately two-dozen sites that are being considered for the MER landing ellipses. Each map is based on MDIM-1 coordinates, in simple cylindrical projections at 128 pixels/degree. Maps include the MDIMs and the MDIMs with full-resolution thermal inertia values superimposed. The black ellipses are high-priority, ROTO targets and the white ellipses are medium-priority, nadir-only imaging areas as distributed by Matt Golombek and Tim Parker.

Uncertainty in the thermal inertia value:

Uncertainties in thermal inertia relate to (i) uncertainties in the temperature measurement and the derivation algorithm, (ii) uncertainties associated with ancillary information used in deriving thermal inertia, (iii) thermophysics not included in the numerical models, and (iv) uncertainties in the geographical location of the observation. The uncertainty in the derived values of thermal inertia is shown in the table below (from Mellon et al.). Each of these is discussed briefly below. (i) Uncertainties associated with the measurement and derivation algorithm:

uncertainty in the measured temperature;
uncertainty in the thermal model used to generate the lookup table;
the interpolation scheme.

The total uncertainty in the table should be considered an upper limit estimate, as it was assumed that all errors are positive, systematic, and add.

(ii) Uncertainties associated with ancillary information used in the determination of thermal inertia:

albedo is retrieved from a map at 1/4 degree resolution;
surface pressure is partly estimated from a MGS MOLA map of elevation at 1 degree resolution (Smith et al., 1999).

(iii) Thermophysical processes not included in the numerical models or simplifying assumptions:

dust opacity is assumed to be spatially and temporally invariant with an infrared value of 0.1;
regional surface slopes that affect the local solar incidence angle are not included.

(iv) Issues related to the absolute location of observations on the martian surface:

there is an absolute uncertainty in TES pointing of up to 6 km downtrack due to spacecraft timing errors;
there is an offset between the TES areocentric coordinates and Viking USGS cartographic coordinates that can range up to ~15 km.

In order to correct for these location uncertainties, thermal-inertia maps are aligned with the underlying MDIM by eye; most maps include enough features that correlate with the underlying geology or albedo on the MDIM to allow appropriate corrections to be made.

ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS AND CAVEATS:

Small temporal variations in dust opacity can cause what appear as discontinuous changes in thermal inertia between spatially adjacent ground tracks, which are taken a month or more apart.
Surfaces with thermal-inertia values greater than 800 or less than 24 (SI units) are not mapped.
The field of view of each detector is smeared ~6 km downtrack since image motion compensation has been disabled; therefore the resolution is best described as 6 x 3 km.
There are isolated problems with individual orbits or observations, but not with entire maps. General patterns and trends that are seen are real.

Table 2: Uncertainty estimates for each step in thermal inertia computation
	TES	Thermal	Interpolation							Total
	Measurement	Model	Inertia	Albedo	Pressure	Opacity	Hour	Season	Latitude	Uncertainty

Bolometer	2.7	1.4	0.10	0.10	0.65	0.10	0.50	0.25	0.20	6.0
Spectrometer	13.6	1.8	0.10	0.10	0.20	0.10	0.50	0.25	0.20	16.9

Uncertainties are for a 180K surface temperature, nighttime observation. All values are given in percent of the derived thermal inertia.

References:

Mellon, M. T., B. M. Jakosky, H. H. Kieffer, and P. R. Christensen, High Resolution Thermal Inertia Mapping from the Mars Global Surveyor Thermal Emission Spectrometer, Icarus, 148, 437-455, 2000.

Smith, D., M. Zuber, S. Solomon, R. Phillips, J. Head, J. Garvin, W. Banerdt, D. Muhleman, G. Pettengill, G. Neumann, F. Lemoine, J. Abshire, O. Aharonson, C. Brown, S. Hauck, A. Ivanov, P. McGovern, H. Zwally, T. Duxbury, The Global Topography of Mars and Implications for Surface Evolution, Science, 284, 1495-1503, 1999.