Related papers: Identifying the Potential Biosphere of Mars
We determined the possible compensation depths for relief harmonics of different degrees and orders. The relief is shown to be completely compensated within the depth range of 0 to 1400 km. The lateral distributions of compensation masses…
Global dust storms are the most thermodynamically significant dust events on Mars. They are produced from the combination of multiple local and regional lifting events and maintained by positive radiative-dynamic feedbacks. The most recent…
All three terrestrial planets with atmospheres support O3 layers of some thickness. While currently only that of Earth is substantial enough to be climatically significant, we hypothesize that ancient Mars may also have supported a thick O3…
Several physical mechanisms are involved in excavating granular materials beneath a vertical jet of gas. These occur, for example, beneath the exhaust plume of a rocket landing on the soil of the Moon or Mars. A series of experiments and…
The amount and distribution of water on the lunar surface are related to the input and production of water by solar wind and meteoroid bombardment, balanced by photodestruction and mobility across the surface. Using the Stratospheric…
Nominally anhydrous minerals (NAMs) are the primary carriers of water in rocky planet mantles. Therefore, studying water solubilities of major NAMs in the mantle can help us estimate the water storage capacities of rocky planet mantles and…
With a fleet of exploratory space missions on the horizon, the study of target specific biospheres is crucial for accurately determining the probability of the existence of microbial life on various planetary bodies and prioritising targets…
The water abundance in a planetary atmosphere provides a key constraint on the planet's primordial origins because water ice is expected to play an important role in the core accretion model of planet formation. However, the water content…
Planet formation models suggest that the small exoplanets that migrate from beyond the snowline of the protoplanetary disk likely contain water-ice-rich cores ($\sim 50\%$ by mass), also known as the water worlds. While the observed radius…
Spacecraft entering Mars require precise navigation algorithms capable of accurately estimating the vehicle's position and velocity in dynamic and uncertain atmospheric environments. Discrepancies between the true Martian atmospheric…
The deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H or 2H/1H) ratio of Martian atmospheric water (~6x standard mean ocean water, SMOW) is higher than that of known sources, requiring planetary enrichment. A recent measurement by NASA's Mars Science Laboratory…
Small-crater counts on Mars light-toned sedimentary rock are often inconsistent with any isochron; these data are usually plotted then ignored. We show (using an 18-HiRISE-image, >10^4 crater dataset) that these non-isochron crater counts…
Massive and water-rich planets should be ubiquitous in the universe. Many of those worlds are expected to be subject to important irradiation from their host star, and display supercritical water layers surrounded by extended steam…
Abundant geomorphological and geochemical evidence of liquid water on the surface of early Mars during the late Noachian and early Hesperian periods needs to be reconciled with a fainter young Sun. While a dense CO2 atmosphere and related…
Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of…
The illuminated dusty surface of Mars acts like a gas pump. It is driven by thermal creep at low pressure within the soil. In the top soil layer this gas flow has to be sustained by a pressure gradient. This is equivalent to a lifting force…
We describe the results of the first tests made on LISA, a simulator of planetary environments designed and built in Padua, dedicated to the study of the limit of bacterial life on the planet Mars. Tests on the cryogenic circuit, on the UV…
We extracted a Martian water-ice cloud climatology from OMEGA data covering 7 Martian years (MY 26-32). We derived two products, the Reversed Ice Cloud Index (ICIR) and the Percentage of Cloudy Pixels (PCP), indicating the mean cloud…
Although deuterium (D) on Mars has received substantial attention, the deuterated ionosphere remains relatively unstudied. This means that we also know very little about non-thermal D escape from Mars, since it is primarily driven by excess…
The conditions that a planet must fulfill to be habitable are not precisely known. However, it is comparatively easier to define conditions under which a planet is very likely not habitable. Finding such conditions is important as it can…