MESSENGER MASCS VIRS Updated Geometry

Kurzfassung

The Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) [1] instrument was onboard the NASA MESSENGER mission which operated between 2004 and 2011, when the spacecraft was crashed onto Mercury’s surface. MASCS contained two detectors, an Ultraviolet-Visible Spectrometer (UVVS) and a Visible-Infrared Spectrograph (VIRS). VIRS covered the wavelength ranges of the visible (300-1050 nm) and near infrared (850-1450 nm), with an average spectral resolution of 5 nm. MASCS investigated the composition and structure of Mercury’s exosphere and globally mapped the surface reflectance on spatial scales of 5 km. We recomputed MASCS geometries using the NAIF SPICE toolkit python implementation spiceypy [2]. The code and the output dataset will be publicly available following FAIR principles (see www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/ too).