MESSENGER Mercury Global Mosaics Enhanced through GSA Pansharpening

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission delivered multispectral global image mosaics of Mercury representing the reference for the geomorphological and spectroscopic characterization of the hermean surface at regional to local (i.e., hundreds of meters) scales. However, these global products inherit the spatially inconsistent and significantly low spatial resolution of the global MDIS datasets due to the MESSENGER spacecraft orbit, especially in the southern hemisphere. This creates a critical resolution gap compared to the higher-resolution monochromatic data. This dataset addresses this limitation by applying the Gram–Schmidt Adaptive (GSA) pansharpening technique to enhance the spatial resolution of global multispectral mosaics. The method has been used to process two key datasets, the Map Projected Multispectral Reduced Data Record mosaic and the Basemap Enhanced Color Global Mosaic, successfully increasing their resolution fourfold, from 665 m/px to a globally consistent 166 m/px. Both datasets are distributed both as single files and as quadrangle subsets to simplify their use. The Enhanced color map is released in two numerical formats: Integer (Byte) like the original, and floating 32bit as produced by the tool, which better preserves surface variations at the cost of greater computational and storage.