Reprocessed Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) profiles and a Digital Elevation Model (DEM)

The h5 file mla_reprs_77_90_0_360.h5 stores the reprocessed Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) profiles and the python script MLA_reprocessed_profiles_extration.py is the tool to extract the data as dictionaries of pandas dataframes.

For the pandas dataframe for each of the profiles, there are a total of 12 columns. "et" is the laser pulse emission time; "chn" denotes the quality flag of the footprint; "tof" is the laser pulse time-of-flight; "offndr" is the off-nadir pointing angle in degree; "orbit" denotes the number of orbit; "spot_ix", "spot_iy", and "spot_iz" denote the inertial coordinates of the footprint in the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) frame centered at the Center-of-Mass of Mercury; "spot_et" is the time of the laser pulse reflection on Mercury's surface; "spot_lat", "spot_lon", and "spot_radius" are the spherical coordinates of the footprint in the body-fixed frame of Mercury.

Mla_reprocessed_self_reg_77_84_250m.tif is the digital elevation model (DEM) generated from self-registration of the reprocessed profiles, for the purposes of measuring the tidal deformation of Mercury. NoData is set to be -32768 in the metadata.

Details of the techniques applied to obtain these data products can be found at Xiao, H., Stark, A., Steinbrügge, G. B., Briaud, A., Lara, L. M., & Gutiérrez, P. J. (2024). Mercury's tidal Love number h2 from co-registration of MLA profiles. Authorea Preprints. In Revision with Geophysical Research Letters.