Venus gravity: A high‐resolution map

Abstract

The Doppler data from the radio tracking of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter (PV0) have been used in a two‐stage analysis to develop a high‐resolution map of the gravitational potential of Venus, represented by a central mass and a surface mass density. The two‐stage procedure invokes a Kalman filter‐smoother to determine the orbit of the spacecraft, and a stabilized linear inverter to estimate the surface mass density. The resultant gravity map is highly correlated with the topographic map derived from the PV0 radar altimeter data. However, the magnitudes of the gravity variations are smaller than would be expected if the topography were uncompensated, indicating that at least partial compensation has taken place.