An Improved Digital Elevation Model of the Lunar Mons Rümker Region Based on Multisource Altimeter Data

Abstract

Mons Rümker is the primary candidate region for the lunar landing mission of Chang’E-5. We propose a data processing method that combines multisource altimeter data and we developed an improved digital elevation model (DEM) of the Mons Rümker region with a horizontal resolution of 256 pixels per degree. The lunar orbiter laser altimeter (LOLA) onboard the lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) acquired 884 valid orbital benchmark data with a high precision. A special crossover adjustment of 156 orbital profiles from the Chang’E-1 laser altimeter (LAM) and 149 orbital profiles from the SELenological and ENgineering Explorer (SELENE) laser altimeter (LALT) was applied. The radial residual root mean square (RMS) of the LAM was reduced from 154.83 ± 43.60 m to 14.29 ± 27.84 m and that of the LALT was decreased from 3.50 ± 5.0 m to 2.75 ± 4.4 m. We used the adjusted LAM and LALT data to fill the LOLA gaps and created the merged LOLA + LAM and LOLA + LALT DEMs. The merged LOLA + LAM DEM showed distortions because of the horizontal geolocation errors in the LAM data. The merged LOLA + LALT DEM was closer to the ground truth than the LOLA-only DEM when validated with the images of the LRO camera (LROC).