Climatology legacy of the Mars Express mission
Résumé
Mars Express has continuously monitored the Martian environment from orbit since January 2004 (a total of more than seven Martian years) and is planned to continue for several more years. Among the numerous and important outcomes of the mission is thus a unique ensemble of climatology datasets. The datasets are unique because of 1) the very diverse payloads and 2) the non sun-synchronous polar orbit which has allowed, year after year, to observed atmospheric phenomena at various local times and seasons. The Martian environment have been remotely observed at many wavelengths: radar (ionosphere), radio (temperature and ionosphere), thermal infrared (temperatures, aerosols, clouds, water vapor), near infrared (frost, aerosols, water vapor,fluorescence), visible, and UV (ozone, temperatures, aerosols, airglow). The Mars Express team is now working to make the Mars Express "legacy" high level dataset available to the science community in the most convenient way on the ESA Planetary Science Archive.