Publications

Abstract Geodetic control networks underpin nearly every derived planetary spatial product — image mosaics, digital terrain models, and landing-site hazard maps — yet no accepted classification exists for reporting or comparing their horizontal positional accuracy. Terrestrial geodesy solved an analogous problem decades ago: the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Geospatial Positioning Accuracy Standards, Part 2…

Abstract The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has been the subject of intensive multi-instrument monitoring since its discovery, yielding published production rates for H2O, CO2, CO, and several minor species from numerous ground- and space-based facilities. Several studies have noted that individual production-rate measurements disagree between instruments, and multiple recent papers have explicitly identified the absence of…

Abstract Planetary digital elevation models (DEMs) are almost universally reported using a single root-mean-square-error (RMSE) figure, independent of the application the product will support. Terrestrial hydrographic practice abandoned this approach decades ago: the International Hydrographic Organization’s S-44 standard assigns survey “Orders” prescriptively, from a declared operational use case, rather than leaving adequacy to be judged…

Abstract The volatile production-rate literature for interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS spans 12 instruments with differing aperture, fluorescence-model, and reduction-pipeline assumptions — flagged by at least three independent teams as a source of uncorrected systematic bias. Using a companion crosscalibration of 125 published production-rate measurements (Dumpati, 2026), we develop a fourcomponent prospective framework for future LSST-detected interstellar…

Abstract MESSENGER’s Neutron Spectrometer provided strong evidence for polar water ice at Mercury’s north pole, but its eccentric orbit never sampled the south pole. Every existing estimate of Mercury’s polar water-ice inventory therefore assumes, untested, that the south pole shares the north’s composition. We present a pre-registered, quantitative framework testing that assumption with BepiColombo’s Mercury…

Europa Clipper’s REASON and JUICE’s RIME instruments will be the first ice-penetrating radars flown to an icy moon with subsurface brine detection as an explicit science objective, and both missions cite Antarctic ice-shelf radar-sounding studies as their primary terrestrial heritage. That heritage, however, rests entirely on sparse, single-epoch airborne surveys, leaving open a basic question:…

The satellite laser altimeter can augment the very sparsely populated gauges of rivers. This study validated the water surface elevations of (NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2) ICESat-2 ATL13 version 7 from 362 granules (2018-2025) using SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) stage records for River Dee and River Don, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. From the 1,340…

Antarctic ice shelf stability is sensitive to seawater infiltration in the firn layer, yet satellite confirmation of brine signatures remains limited at C-band frequencies. Cook et al. (2018) identified five ice shelves as the highest-priority candidates for brine infiltration. We present a seven-year (2019–2025) Sentinel-1 C-band SAR backscatter time series for all five sites in…

We present a multi-satellite constrained water budget approach that combines SWOT Ka-radar altimeter and ICESat-2 ATL13 photon counting lidar measurements. The work presented here was conducted on the world’s largest gravity fed irrigation scheme located in Sudan which has an area of approximately 8,800 km². The SWOT River SP v2.0 product provided Blue Nile boundary…

Antarctic ice shelves are being affected in an increasing number of ways through warmer oceans. The increased warmth in the oceans causes a process known as basal melting, which increases the speed of movement of the ice sheet and decreases back stress on grounding lines. Therefore, it is important to understand what factors affect where…