Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of northern Brøggerhalvøya (Svalbard, Norway) with Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) of 50 cm

HRSC is a multisensor pushbroom instrument with 9 CCD line sensors mounted in parallel that has been in orbit around Mars since January 2004 on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft (Gwinner et al., 2016). It simultaneously obtains high-resolution stereo, multicolor, and multiphase images. Digital photogrammetric techniques are used to reconstruct the topography on the basis of five stereo channels, which provide five different views of the ground.

An airborne version of the HRSC was used for the acquisition of stereo and color images in Svalbard. Since 1997, different airborne versions of HRSC have been developed. The principles of HRSC-AX data processing are described by Gwinner et al. (2006). The orientation data of the camera are reconstructed from a global positioning system inertial navigation system (GPS INS). HRSC-AX has been applied in diverse technical and scientific applications (e.g., Gwinner et al., 1999, 2000; Hauber et al., 2001; Otto et al., 2007) and has also been successfully used to investigate rock glacier activity (Roer and Nyenhuis, 2007). The flight campaign in July–August 2008 covered a total of seven regions in Svalbard: (1) Longyearbyen and the surroundings of Adventfjorden, (2) large parts of Adventdalen, (3) large parts of the Brøggerhalvøya (halvøya = peninsula) in western Spitsbergen (this dataset), (4) the Bockfjorden area in northern Spitsbergen, (5) the northeastern shore of the Palanderbukta and the margin of the adjacent ice cap in Nordaustlandet, (6) an area on Prins Karls Forland, and (7) the area of the abandoned Russian mining settlement of Pyramiden together with the nearby Ebbedalen.  

This dataset is a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) derived from HRSC-AX stereo images. The elevations recorded in the DEM are ellipsoid heights; i.e., they are not computed with respect to a geoid but to a mathematically defined reference surface, which is arotational ellipsoid with the equatorial A and B axes both having a radius of 6378.14 km and the polarC axis having a radius of 6356.75 km. This results in an offset of about 36.5m with respect to geoidheights; i.e., sea level in the HRSC-AX DEM is not at 0 m, but at ~36.5 m.

References

Gwinner, K., Hauber, E., Hoffmann, H., Scholten, F., Jaumann, R., Neukum, G.,Coltelli, M., and Puglisi, G., 1999, The HRSC-A experiment on high reso-lution imaging and DEM generation at the Aeolian Islands, in Proceedingsof the 13th International Conference on Applied Geologic Remote Sens-ing: Ann Arbor, Michigan, ERIM International, v. I, p. 560–569.

Gwinner, K., Hauber, E., Jaumann, R., and Neukum, G., 2000, High-resolution,digital photogrammetric mapping: A tool for earth science: Eos(Transactions, American Geophysical Union), v. 81, no. 44, p. 513–520,doi:10.1029/00EO00364.

Gwinner, K., Coltelli, M., Flohrer, J., Jaumann, R., Matz, K.-D., Marsella, M.,Roatsch, T., Scholten, F., and Trauthan, F., 2006, The HRSC-AX Mt.Etna Project: High-Resolution Orthoimages and 1 m DEM at RegionalScale: International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing,v. XXXVI, Part 1, http://isprs.free.fr/documents/Papers/T05-23.pdf.

Gwinner, K., Scholten, F., Spiegel, M., Schmidt, R., Giese, B., Oberst,J., Heipke, C., Jaumann, R., and Neukum, G., 2009, Derivation andvalidation of high-resolution digital elevation models from Mars ExpressHRSC data: Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, v. 75,no. 9, p. 1127–1142.

Gwinner, K., Jaumann, R., Hauber, E., et al., 2016, The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) of Mars Express and itsapproach to science analysis and mapping for Mars and its satellites: Planetary and Space Science, v. 126, p. 93–138. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2016.02.014

Hauber, E., Slupetzky, H., Jaumann, R., Wewel, F., Gwinner, K., and Neukum,G., 2001, Digital and automated high resolution stereo mapping of theSonnblick glacier: EARSeL eProceedings, v. 1, no. 1, p. 246–254.

Jaumann, R., Neukum, G., Behnke, T., Duxbury, T.C., Eichentopf, K., Flohrer,J., van Gasselt, S., Giese, B., Gwinner, K., Hauber, E., Hoffmann, H., Hoff-meister, A., Köhler, U., Matz, K.-D., McCord, T.B., Mertens, V., Oberst,J., Pischel, R., Reiss, D., Ress, E., Roatsch, T., Saiger, P., Scholten, F.,Schwarz, G., Stephan, K., Wählisch, M., and the HRSC Co-InvestigatorTeam, 2007, The high-resolution stereo camera (HRSC) experiment onMars Express: instrument aspects and experiment conduct from interplan-etary cruise through the nominal mission: Planetary and Space Science, v.55, p. 928–952, doi:10.1016/j.pss.2006.12.003.

Otto, J.-C., Kleinod, K., König, O., Krautblatter, M., Nyenhuis, M., Roer,I., Schneider, M., Schreiner, B., and Dikau, R., 2007, HRSC-A data:A new high-resolution data set with multipurpose applications in physi-cal geography: Progress in Physical Geography, v. 31, no. 2, p. 179–197,doi:10.1177/0309133307076479.

Roer, I., and Nyenhuis, M., 2007, Rockglacier activity studies on a regionalscale: Comparison of geomorphological mapping and photogrammetricmonitoring: Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, v. 32, p. 1747–1758,doi:10.1002/esp.1496.