How to determine average equatorial surface elevation on planets/moons?

[Armisael]

I'm interested in working out the average elevation above sea level for the equators of the airless bodies (ideally both mean and median). I can do this by putting a satellite in an equatorial orbit and using kerbnet, but then I have to manually log an altitude every 3.5s for like 40 minutes per body. I'm hoping there's a somewhat less labor-intensive approach. Is there are kOS script or a website that has already logged them?

[Dunbaratu]

On 10/9/2019 at 3:42 PM, Armisael said:

I'm interested in working out the average elevation above sea level for the equators of the airless bodies (ideally both mean and median). I can do this by putting a satellite in an equatorial orbit and using kerbnet, but then I have to manually log an altitude every 3.5s for like 40 minutes per body. I'm hoping there's a somewhat less labor-intensive approach. Is there are kOS script or a website that has already logged them?

In kOS, this code would store a list of altitudes around the equator:

local the_body is Mun. // or set to some other body to measure.
local alt_list is list().
local startlong is 0.
local stoplong is 360.
local steplong is 0.5. // samples 0.5 longitude degreees apart. Set smaller for more fine-grain measure.
for long in range(startlong, stoplong, steplong)
{
  // latitude = 0 to hardcode equator, longitude varies through the loop:
  alt_list:add( the_body:geopositionlatlng(0, long):terrainheight ).
}

// Now alt_list is a list of terrain heights around the equator.
// Do whatever statistical work on that list that you like in the lines below...
// for example - to get the mean:
local sum is 0.
for long in alt_list
  set sum to sum + long.
local mean is sum / alt_list:length.

Warning: the above code is not tested.  I typed it in without trying to run it.  It may have errors.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Steven Mading
There was syntax error because of a space between colon (":") and "terrainheight".