Related papers: Enabling Ice Core Science on Mars and Ocean Worlds

Planets, embedded in their natal discs, harbour hot envelopes. When pebbles are accreted by these planets, the contained volatile components may sublimate, enriching the envelope and potentially changing its thermodynamical properties.…

Sulfur is the tenth most abundant element in the universe and is known to play a significant role in biological systems. Accordingly, in recent years there has been increased interest in the role of sulfur in astrochemical reactions and…

The study of comets affords a unique window into the birth, infancy, and subsequent history of the solar system. There is strong evidence that comets incorporated pristine interstellar material as well as processed nebular matter, providing…

Water ice is important for the evolution and preservation of life. Identifying the distribution of water ice in debris disks is therefore of great interest in the field of astrobiology. Furthermore, icy dust grains are expected to play…

Space weather observations and modeling at Mars have begun but they must be significantly increased to support the future of Human Exploration on the Red Planet. A comprehensive space weather understanding of a planet without a global…

Freeze-out of the gas phase elements onto cold grains in dense interstellar and circumstellar media builds up ice mantles consisting of molecules that are mostly formed in situ (H2O, NH3, CO2, CO, CH3OH, and more). This review summarizes…

Aqueous metabolites in terrestrial subsurface environments provide critical analog frameworks for assessing the habitability of Martian subsurface ice. On Earth, they play critical roles in sustaining microbial life within soils,…

Enceladus, a small icy moon of Saturn, is one of the most remarkable bodies in the solar system. This moon is a geologically active object, and despite the lower temperatures on most of its surface, the geothermally heated south polar…

SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), is the second mission of 'Earth Explorer' to be developed within the program 'Living Planet' of the European Space Agency (ESA). This satellite, containing the very first 1.4GHz interferometric…

Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…

Study of exoplanets is one of the main goals of present research in planetary sciences and astrobiology. Analysis of huge planetary data from space missions such as CoRoT and Kepler is directed ultimately at finding a planet similar to…

Recent investigations have demonstrated the potential for utilizing a new observational and data analysis technique for studying the atmospheres of non-transiting exoplanets with combined light that relies on acquiring simultaneous,…

Comets likely formed in the outer regions of the protosolar nebula where they incorporated and preserved primitive presolar materials, volatiles resident in the outer disk, and more refractory materials from throughout the disk. The return…

Thermal infrared data (TIR; 8 - 15 $\mu m$) has a wide range of applications in Earth and planetary remote sensing. On Mars, this includes deriving thermal inertia (TI), which describes surface physical characteristics (e.g. particle size,…

Ice sintering is a form of metamorphism that drives the microstructural evolution of an aggregate of grains through surface and volume diffusion. This leads to an increase in the grain-to-grain contact area ("neck") and density of the…

The proposed CUBES spectrograph for ESO's Very Large Telescope will be an exceptionally powerful instrument for the study of comets. The gas coma of a comet contains a large number of emission features in the near-UV range covered by CUBES…

Ice is a major component of astrophysical environment - from interstellar molecular clouds through protoplanetary disks to evolved solar systems. Ice and complex organic matter coexist in these environments as well, and it is thought…

The Martian upper atmosphere is known to vary diurnally and seasonally due to changing amounts of solar radiation. However, in the upper thermosphere and exosphere, the neutrals are also subject to ion precipitation. This can increase the…

The Orbiting Astronomical Satellite for Investigating Stellar Systems (OASIS) is a NASA Astrophysics MIDEX-class mission concept, with the stated goal of following water from galaxies, through protostellar systems, to Earth's oceans. This…

The martian atmosphere hosts dynamical phenomena ranging from planet-encircling dust storms to mesoscale orographic clouds and nocturnal low-level jets. General circulation model show capability to simulate these phenomena, but is…