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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

Recent results from ChemCam Passive Sky Spectroscopy at Gale Crater, Mars

Résumé

The Mars Science Laboratory's (MSL) ChemCam spectrometer measures atmospheric aerosol properties as well as O2 and H2O gas abundances by operating in passive mode and observing scattered sky light at two different elevation angles [1]. To date, the most important ChemCam passive sky results include: In-situ water vapor (measured by the REMS humidity sensor) is depleted in the pre-dawn hours relative to column water vapor (measured by ChemCam); this is likely caused by nighttime adsorption onto soil grains [2] and appears to vary with surface properties [3]. Dust aerosol particles sizes are found to be very large at the peak of the 2018 global dust storm, in good agreement with other MSL sky observations during this time [4,5]. Outside of major dust events, the ChemCam dust aerosol particle sizes show a smooth seasonal variation as well as inter-annual variability that seems to be correlated with ChemCam-measured inter-annual variability in aphelion season ice cloud opacity. This is well-corroborated by REMS UV sensor dust particle size results [4,5,6]. O2 column-averaged volume mixing ratios are unexpectedly high and show variability well beyond expectations for a non-condensable trace gas. To-date, interpretation of these O2 results remains complicated by not-yet-fully-understood uncertainties. While ChemCam passive sky observations are ongoing, all of these results are based largely on the first 1300 sols of MSL operations, plus a small amount of additional analysis around the 2018 global dust storm. We will report on the results of a new research effort to improve our methodology, most importantly for O2, and to extend the available data set to cover the last ~1.5 Martian years of ChemCam sky observations. REFERENCES: [1] McConnochie, et al. (2018), Icarus, 307. [2] Savijarvi et al. (2019) Icarus 319. [3] Savijarvi et al. (2019) Icarus 326. [4] Lemmon et al., submitted to GRL. [5] Lemmon et al. (2019) 9th Int. Conf. on Mars #6298. [6] Vicente-Retortillo et al. (2017), GRL, 44.
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insu-04406723 , version 1 (19-01-2024)

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T. H. Mcconnochie, M. D. Smith, M. J. Wolff, M. T. Lemmon, R. C. Wiens, et al.. Recent results from ChemCam Passive Sky Spectroscopy at Gale Crater, Mars. AGU Fall Meeting 2019, Dec 2019, San Francisco (CA), United States. ⟨insu-04406723⟩
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