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Remote sensing of the energy of auroral electrons in Saturn’s atmosphere: Hubble and Cassini spectral observations

Bonfond, B.; Nichols, J. D.; Clarke, J. T. +6 more

Saturn’s north ultraviolet aurora has been successfully observed twice between March and May 2011 with the STIS long-slit spectrograph on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Spatially resolved spectra at ∼12 Å spectral resolution have been collected at different local times from dawn to dusk to determine the amount of hydrocarbon absorption. For thi…

Evidence for Amazonian mid-latitude glaciation on Mars from impact crater asymmetry

Mangold, Nicolas; Conway, Susan J.

We find that crater slopes in the mid-latitudes of Mars have a marked north-south asymmetry, with the pole-facing slopes being shallower. We mapped impact craters in two southern hemisphere sites (Terra Cimmeria and Noachis Terra) and one northern hemisphere site (Acidalia Planitia) and used elevation data from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (H…

The dark side of Saturn’s B ring: Seasons as clues to its structure

Ferrari, C.; Reffet, E.

The unlit side of the dense B ring of Saturn does not receive direct sunlight. Yet it cools down as the Sun sets on the ring from solstice to equinox. A multi-scale thermal model that treats the heat transfer through a packed ensemble of particles is built to study the orbital and seasonal temperature variations of both lit and unlit sides of this…

Retrieval of jovian cloud structure from the Cassini ISS limb-darkening data. I. Continuum scattering phase functions for cloud and haze in the South Tropical Zone

Kasaba, Y.; Sato, T. M.; Satoh, T.

We have deduced the scattering properties of aerosols in the jovian upper troposphere by analyzing imaging data obtained at a wide variety of solar phase angles (4-140°) by the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) during its flyby of Jupiter. The limb-darkening curves along the South Tropical Zone (STrZ) are extracted …

Comet 67P/CG: Influence of the sublimation coefficient on the temperature and outgassing

Markiewicz, Wojciech J.; Kossacki, Konrad J.

The sublimation rate of ice is commonly calculated using simple Hertz-Knudsen formula. This formula is derived from the kinetic theory of gases and ignores microphysical processes determining the actual sublimation rate. The microphysical processes can be accounted for by including in the Herz-Knudsen equation a temperature dependent sublimation c…

The influence of recent major crater impacts on the surrounding surfaces of (21) Lutetia

Jorda, L.; Kührt, E.; Thomas, N. +4 more

We present 3-D simulations of impacts into Asteroid 21 Lutetia, the subject of a fly-by by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Using a 3-D shape model of the asteroid, impacts of sizes sufficient to reproduce the observed craters in Lutetia’s North Polar Crater Cluster (NPCC) as observed by the OSIRIS ex…

The vertical structure of the F ring of Saturn from ring-plane crossings

Nicholson, Philip D.; Scharringhausen, Britt R.

We present a photometric model of the rings of Saturn which includes the main rings and an F ring, inclined to the main rings, with a Gaussian vertical profile of optical depth. This model reproduces the asymmetry in brightness between the east and west ansae of the rings of Saturn that was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) within a few…

Martian atmospheric particulate spectral end-members recovery from PFS and IRIS data

Palomba, Ernesto; Zinzi, Angelo; Helbert, Jörn +2 more

We present an application of a multivariate analyses technique on data returned by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) instrument on board the ESA’s Mars Express (MEX) spacecraft in order to separate the atmospheric contribution from the observed radiation. We observe that Thermal/Far Infrared spectra returned from Mars, covering almost a who…

Corrigendum to “Titan’s surface and atmosphere from Cassini/VIMS data with updated methane opacity” [Icarus 226 (2013) 470-486]

Le Mouélic, S.; Rodriguez, S.; Lellouch, E. +13 more