Other
Scientific paper
Sep 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008epsc.conf...58w&link_type=abstract
European Planetary Science Congress 2008, Proceedings of the conference held 21-25 September, 2008 in Münster, Germany. Online a
Other
Scientific paper
In this study we present temperature profiles in the lower atmosphere of Mars from simultaneous observations performed by Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) aboard Mars Express (MEX) spacecraft [1, 2] and the Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (MiniTES) aboard Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) [3, 4]. Thermal infrared spectra were collected in both the upward-looking from the ground and downward-looking geometries from the orbital level. We used two sets of criteria to select PFS observations. These criteria took into account the location around landing sites of rovers, the local time and the solar longitude corresponding to the Martian day (sol). First set of criteria included PFS measurements carried out within + 20 in latitudes and longitudes, within 1 hour and same sol. The next set of criteria covered the area 50 x 50 around landing sites, within 1 hour and 3 or 5 sols. We have all sort of possible combinations, in the sense that sometimes we have very good correlation between the temperature profiles (Fig.1) from remote sensing and local probing, some other times the correlation is not so good (Fig.2). It is not a coincidence, however, that when we have good correlation, we also have almost the same, or very close local time, while if the local time is different, even by some tens of minutes, the correlation between the two temperature profiles, from the orbiter and from the ground is very poor. In other words the Local Time seems to be a very important parameter, and coincidence of local time is needed to have a good correlation of the temperature profile. The second important parameter is the PFS footprint location. Moving the footprint away from the position of the rovers decreases the correlation of the temperature profile: at 50 km distance the correlation may be poor, specially if the Local time is not coincident. Horizontal differences between temperatures obtained from observations within 10 around the landing sites of rovers are also within the retrieval error around 5 K at the same local time. The third parameter for importance is Ls : 2-4 degrees of difference are negligible if the local time is the same: even 4 days later PFS observes still the same temperature profile in one case, meaning that the atmospheric conditions remained stable during such period. The purpose of this study is to confirm the validity of PFS temperature profiles close to the surface. Atmospheric temperatures below 5 km are retrieved from satellite measurements with a large uncertainty because of poor pieces of information in the wings of the CO2 absorption band at 667 cm-1. The MiniTES temperature profiles span atmospheric layers below 2 km. We can conclude that the retrieval of temperature profiles below 5 km obtained from measurements performed in the downward-looking geometry by the PFS spectrometer is largely consistent with upwardlooking temperature retrievals from Mini-TES given the different vertical resolutions of the two instruments and their combined uncertainties.
D'Amore Mario
Formisano Vittorio
Grassi Daniele
Rinaldi Giovanna
Smith Masson D.
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