Integral inversion of GRAIL inter-satellite gravitational accelerations for regional recovery of the lunar gravitational field

© 2019 COSPAR We present an integral-based approach for high-resolution regional recovery of the gravitational field in this article. We derive rigorous remove-compute-restore integral estimators relating the line-of-sight gravitational acceleration to an arbitrary order radial derivative of the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Šprlák, M., Han, S.C., Featherstone, Will
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: ELSEVIER SCI LTD 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP160104095
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/81664
Description
Summary:© 2019 COSPAR We present an integral-based approach for high-resolution regional recovery of the gravitational field in this article. We derive rigorous remove-compute-restore integral estimators relating the line-of-sight gravitational acceleration to an arbitrary order radial derivative of the gravitational potential. The integral estimators are composed of three terms, i.e., the truncated integration, the low-frequency line-of-sight gravitational acceleration, and the high-frequency truncation error (effect of the distant zones). We test the accuracy of the integral transformations and of the integral estimators in a closed-loop simulation over the Montes Jura region on the nearside of the Moon. In this way, we determine optimal sizes of integration radii and grid discretisation. In addition, we investigate the performance of the regional integral inversion with synthetic and realistic GRAIL observations. We demonstrate that the regional inversion results of the disturbing gravitational potential and its first order radial derivative in the Montes Jura mountain range are less contaminated by high-frequency noise than the global spherical harmonic models.