A harmonic spline model for local estimation of planetary gravity fields from line-of-sight acceleration data

Abstract.

The spline interpolation technique is applied to estimate locally the radial component of a planetary gravity field from residual acceleration data along a special direction, the direction of observation from the Earth. After the presentation of the theoretical framework, the method is tested on synthetic and real data in the case of Venus. It is shown that this spline technique can be used succesfully to build local models of radial gravity fields at the planet surface.