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Rosetta-Alice Observations of Exospheric Hydrogen and Oxygen on Mars | Paul D. Feldman
; Andrew J. Steffl
; Joel Wm. Parker
; Michael F. A'Hearn
; Jean-Loup Bertaux
; S. Alan Stern
; Harold A. Weaver
; David C. Slater
; Maarten Versteeg
; Henry B. Throop
; Nathaniel J. Cunningham
; Lori M. Feaga
; | Date: |
20 Jun 2011 | Abstract: | 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 01:54UT. The Alice instrument on
board Rosetta, a lightweight far-ultraviolet imaging spectrograph optimized for
in situ cometary spectroscopy in the 750-2000 A 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 the Ultraviolet Spectrometer
experiment on the Mariner 6 and 7 fly-bys of Mars in 1969. Atomic oxygen
emission at 1304 A 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 based on the
production of suprathermal oxygen atoms by the dissociative recombination of
O2+. | Source: | arXiv, 1106.3926 | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites |
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