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 ¼ 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.

![](media/image1.png){width="6.454166666666667in"
height="1.3444444444444446in"}

**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.