Mercury's gravity, tides, and spin from MESSENGER radio science data
Ashok Kumar Verma, Jean-Luc Margot

TL;DR
This study uses MESSENGER radio science data to refine Mercury's gravity field, spin state, and tidal response, providing insights into its interior structure and thermal state.
Contribution
It presents a detailed gravity and spin model of Mercury using extensive radio tracking data, improving previous estimates and constraining interior properties.
Findings
Mercury's mass parameter GM measured with high precision.
Second-degree gravity coefficients confirmed with better than 0.4% accuracy.
Tidal Love number k2 suggests a hotter, weaker mantle.
Abstract
We analyze radio tracking data obtained during 1311 orbits of the MESSENGER spacecraft in the period March 2011 to April 2014. A least-squares minimization of the residuals between observed and computed values of two-way range and Doppler allows us to solve for a model describing Mercury's gravity, tidal response, and spin state. We use a spherical harmonic representation of the gravity field to degree and order 40 and report error bars corresponding to 10 times the formal uncertainties of the fit. Our estimate of the product of Mercury's mass and the gravitational constant, kms, is in excellent agreement with published results. Our solution for the geophysically important second-degree coefficients (, )…
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