Exploiting the Mercury Surface Reflectance Spectroscopy Dataset from MESSENGER: Making Sense of Three Million Spectra

Abstract

The Mercury Atmospheric and Surface and Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) on the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft has mapped the surface of Mercury on a global basis during its one-year primary orbital mission and the first third of its extended mission, producing more than three million spectra. To analyze this large dataset we make use of our recently developed advanced database management system. This system allows the extraction and simultaneous analysis of large amounts of data, transparent to the underlying data structure. As a test case we analyze here the statistical distribution of MASCS normalized reflectance at a few selected wavelengths. We obtain a separation of Mercury’s surface into spectral classes that are coherent with the results from unsupervised cluster analysis on the same data.