Rosetta-Alice Observations of Exospheric Hydrogen and Oxygen on Mars

Details Rosetta-Alice Observations of Exospheric Hydrogen and Oxygen on Mars Rosetta-Alice Observations of Exospheric Hydrogen and Oxygen on Mars

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.p53e1569f&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #P53E-1569

Physics

[5405] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Atmospheres, [6225] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Mars

Scientific paper

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, en route to a 2014 encounter with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, made a gravity assist swing-by of Mars on 25 February 2007, closest approach being at 01:54 UT. The Alice instrument on board Rosetta, a lightweight far-ultraviolet imaging spectrograph optimized for in situ cometary spectroscopy in the 750--2000 Å spectral band, was used to study the daytime Mars upper atmosphere including emissions from exospheric hydrogen and oxygen. Offset pointing, obtained five hours before closest approach, enabled us to detect and map the HI Lyman-alpha and Lyman-beta emissions from exospheric hydrogen out beyond 30,000 km from the planet's center. These data are fit with a Chamberlain exospheric model from which we derive the hydrogen density at the 200 km exobase and the H escape flux. The results are comparable to those found from the Mariner 6 and 7 fly-bys of Mars in 1969. Atomic oxygen emission at 1304 Å is detected at altitudes of 400 to 1000 km above the limb during limb scans shortly after closest approach. However, the derived oxygen scale height is not consistent with recent models of oxygen escape due to dissociative recombination of O2+.

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