Global composition cartography of Pluto from New Horizons data : registration and model inversion

Séminaire IPAG de Leila Gabasova (IPAG), jeudi 2 mai 2019 à 11h30, salle Manuel Forestini

The 2015 New Horizons flyby of the Pluto system returned a wealth of data, including hyperspectral data from the spacecraft’s LEISA instrument. This will allow us to create a detailed compositional map ; however, multiple processing steps are required in order to make use of the data. This includes spatial registration of multiple datasets to create a combined global map, and the resolution of high-dimensional inverse modeling problems to extract quantitative data on the surface structure and composition from the hyperspectral cubes.

I will present computational tools that are chiefly used in other scientific domains, such as intensity-based registration and metaheuristics,but that have great potential as an addition to the toolkit of planetary science, and show promising preliminary results for the New Horizons Pluto surface data that demonstrate their effectiveness. This will include a global qualitative map of surface components as well as the first quantitative spectral inversion results.