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With the increasing urgency of climate change's impacts and limited success in reducing emissions, "geoengineering," or the artificial manipulation of the climate to reduce warming rates, has been proposed as an alternative short-term…
This work investigates a hybrid photovoltaic-wind-battery power system designed to sustain a Mars base under varying seasonal and climatic conditions. The Mars Climate Database was utilized to simulate the effects of seasonal changes,…
The Mars thermosphere holds clues to the evolution of the Martian climate, and has practical implications for spacecraft visiting Mars, which often use it for aerobraking upon arrival, or for landers, which must pass through it.…
A simple phenomenological account for planetary climate instabilities is presented. The description is based on the standard model where the balance of incoming stellar radiation and outward thermal radiation is described by the effective…
The tidal heating of hypothetical rocky (or terrestrial) extra-solar planets spans a wide range of values depending on stellar masses and initial orbits. Tidal heating may be sufficiently large (in many cases, in excess of radiogenic…
We use the existence of habitable planets to impose anthropic requirements on the fine structure constant, $\alpha$. To this effect, we present two considerations that restrict its value to be very near the one observed. The first, that the…
Self-adaptive thermoregulation, the mechanism living organisms use to balance their temperature, holds great promise for decarbonizing cooling and heating processes. The functionality can be effectively emulated by engineering the thermal…
This thesis work aims to study the possibility of energy production on Martian soil and, in particular, to establish what might be an optimal configuration for an energy system. This goal has been contextualized in the will to feed a…
The TRAPPIST-1 system provides an extraordinary opportunity to study multiple terrestrial extrasolar planets and their atmospheres. Here we use the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Atmosphere Model version 4 to study the…
In this work we present laboratory measurements on the reduction of the threshold friction velocity necessary for lifting dust if the dust bed is illuminated. Insolation of a porous soil establishes a temperature gradient. At low ambient…
The habitable zone for exomoons with Earth-like properties is a non-trivial manifold, compared to that of Earth-like exoplanets. The presence of tidal heating, eclipses and planetary illumination in the exomoon energy budget combine to…
The anomalously large radii of strongly irradiated exoplanets have remained a major puzzle in astronomy. Based on a 2D steady state atmospheric circulation model, the validity of which is assessed by comparison to 3D calculations, we reveal…
We present a new version of the Alfven Wave Solar Model (AWSoM), a global model from the upper chromosphere to the corona and the heliosphere. The coronal heating and solar wind acceleration are addressed with low-frequency Alfven wave…
Bodies that lack a significant atmosphere and internal magnetic fields, such as the Moon and asteroids, can to a first approximation be considered passive absorbers of the solar wind. The solar wind ions and electrons directly impact the…
The evolution of the interior of stagnant-lid bodies is comparatively easier to model and predict with respect to the Earth's due to the absence of the large uncertainties associated with the physics of plate tectonics, its onset time and…
Water-rich planets such as Earth are expected to become eventually uninhabitable, because liquid water does not remain stable at the surface as surface temperatures increase with the solar luminosity over time. Whether a large increase of…
The interiors of many planets consist mostly of fluid layers. When these layers are subject to superadiabatic temperature or compositional gradients, turbulent convection transports heat and momentum. In addition, planets are fast rotators.…
Context. Semi-grey atmospheric models (with one opacity for the visible and one opacity for the infrared) are useful to understand the global structure of irradiated atmospheres, their dynamics and the interior structure and evolution of…
Surface release of radiatively active particles, with high infrared- (IR-)to-visible extinction ratios, has been proposed as a method of warming Mars. However, to warm Mars using aerosols, particles released locally must disperse globally.…
Generating renewable energy on Mars is technologically challenging. Firstly, because compared to Earth, key energy resources such as solar and wind are weak as a result of very low atmospheric pressure and low solar irradiation. Secondly,…