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Atmospheric Science with the Visual Monitoring Camera Onboard Mars Express: Recent Results

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Atmospheric Science with the Visual Monitoring Camera Onboard Mars Express: Recent Results See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338791896 Atmospheric Science with the Visual Monitoring Camera onboard Mars Express: recent results Conference Paper · June 2019 CITATIONS READS 0 165 8 authors, including: Jorge Hernández Bernal T. del Río-Gaztelurrutia Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea 28 PUBLICATIONS 73 CITATIONS 89 PUBLICATIONS 895 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Ricardo Hueso Alejandro Cardesin-Moinelo Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea European Space Astronomy Centre, Madrid, Spain 288 PUBLICATIONS 4,218 CITATIONS 86 PUBLICATIONS 593 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Mars Express View project Solar System Science Operations Laboratory (SOLab) View project All content following this page was uploaded by Jorge Hernández Bernal on 24 January 2020. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Atmospheric Science with the Visual Monitoring Camera onboard Mars Express: recent results Jorge Hernández-Bernal1, Agustín Sánchez-Lavega1, Teresa del Río-Gaztelurrutia1, Ricardo Hueso1, Alejandro Cardesín-Moinelo2, Eleni M. Ravanis2, D.Titov3, Simon Wood4 1 Dpto. Fisica Aplicada I, Escuela de Ingeniería de Bilbao, UPV/EHU, Bilbao, Spain 2 European Space Agency, ESAC, Madrid, Spain 3 European Space Agency, ESTEC, Noordwijk, Netherlands 4 European Space Agency, ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany The Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) onboard Mars Express was initially an engineering camera, but recently upgraded to science instrument [Sánchez-Lavega et al. 2018a, Sánchez-Lavega et al. 2018b]. Our most recent investigations with this new instrument in Mars relate to the observation of clouds in the dark side of the terminator (twilight clouds), and the impact of the recent 2018 Global Dust Storm over the Southern Polar Region [Hernández-Bernal et al. 2019]. A cloud in the dark side of the terminator located at enough altitude over the surface, can keep receiving sun light, appearing as a bright region over the dark of the night in images from orbit. The distance of a bright twilight cloud to the terminator is related to a ”minimum-altitude”, that is, the minimum altitude of the cloud necessary to receive solar illumination. For the study of these twilight clouds, we have developed a cloud detector algorithm that can analyze thousands of images and classify these clouds by areographic position (longitude and latitude), solar longitude (Ls), and minimum-altitude. First results show some significant concentrations of these twilight clouds, mainly around the northern solstice in the region of Terra Cimmeria and Terra Sirenum. During the 2018 Global Dust Storm [Sánchez-Lavega et al. 2019], VMC acquired hundreds of images showing the Southern Polar Region of Mars. These images show the partial penetration of dust to the polar cap, the continuous presence of morning hazes composed of water ice, and aerosol bands crossing the terminator and showing in the night as high altitude clouds. Aerosol features in images taken within 20-40 minutes apart have also enabled the measurement of atmospheric motions in the region. VMC also observed the limb at equatorial and northern latitudes, showing dust up to 60 km over the planetary surface. In addition, VMC keeps obtaining regular images of Mars, now with the participation of a science team in the planning and operations, to study Martian meteorological phenomena and their inter-annual variability as well as surveying peculiar events like the 2012 high altitude plume observed at limb [Sánchez-Lavega et al. 2015] Acknowledgements: This work has been supported by the Spanish project AYA2015-65041-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and Grupos Gobierno Vasco IT-765-13. JHB was supported by ESA Contract No. 4000118461/16/ES/JD, Scientific Support for Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera. We acknowledge support from the Faculty of the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) References: Hernández-Bernal, J. et al. (2019) in preparation Sánchez-Lavega, A. et al. (2015) Nature, 518, 525-528 Sánchez-Lavega, A. et al. (2018a) Icarus, 299, 194-205 Sánchez-Lavega, A. et al. (2018b) JGR Planets 123.11, 3020-3034 Sánchez-Lavega, A., Del Río-Gaztelurrutia, T., Hernández-Bernal, J., Delcroix, M. (2019) GRL (in revision) View publication stats.
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