Search Publications
The dust trail of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko between 2004 and 2006
Reach, William T.; Agarwal, Jessica; Grün, Eberhard +3 more
We report on observations of the dust trail of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (CG) in visible light with the Wide Field Imager at the ESO/MPG 2.2 m telescope at 4.7 AU before aphelion, and at 24µm with the MIPS instrument on board the Spitzer Space Telescope at 5.7 AU both before and after aphelion. The comet did not appear to be active dur…
Large density fluctuations in the martian ionosphere as observed by the Mars Express radar sounder
Gurnett, D. A.; Barabash, S.; Winningham, J. D. +5 more
The MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) instrument on the Mars Express spacecraft provides both local and remote measurements of electron densities and measurements of magnetic fields in the martian ionosphere. The density measurements show a persistent level of large fluctuations, sometimes as much as a factor of t…
Impact cratering records of the mid-sized, icy saturnian satellites
Schenk, Paul; Kirchoff, Michelle R.
Resolution of Voyager 1 and 2 images of the mid-sized, icy saturnian satellites was generally not much better than 1 km per line pair, except for a few, isolated higher resolution images. Therefore, analyses of impact crater distributions were generally limited to diameters ( D) of tens of kilometers. Even with the limitation, however, these analy…
Saturn’s icy satellites investigated by Cassini-VIMS. II. Results at the end of nominal mission
Brown, R. H.; Buratti, B. J.; Clark, R. N. +12 more
We report the detailed analysis of the spectrophotometric properties of Saturn's icy satellites as derived by full-disk observations obtained by visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) experiment aboard Cassini. In this paper, we have extended the coverage until the end of the Cassini's nominal mission (June 1st 2008), while a previous pap…
Titan haze distribution and optical properties retrieved from recent observations
Le Mouélic, S.; Rodriguez, S.; Sotin, C. +4 more
The VIMS instrument onboard Cassini observed the north polar region of Titan at 113° phase angle, 28 December 2006. On this spectral image, a vast polar cloud can be seen northward to 62°N, and elsewhere, the haze appears as the dominant source of scattering. Because the surface does not appear in the wavelength range between 0.3 and 4.9µm, …
Aeolian processes and dune morphology in Gale Crater
Hobbs, Steven W.; Paull, David J.; Bourke, Mary C.
Datasets at resolutions many times greater than previously available were used to study aeolian features within Gale Crater. High resolution thermal inertia data allowed for detailed particle size estimation, with the data sufficient to resolve dunefields. A wide range of grain sizes have now been identified in the Gale Crater dunefields, ranging …
Spatially-resolved high-resolution spectroscopy of Venus 2. Variations of HDO, OCS, and SO 2 at the cloud tops
Krasnopolsky, Vladimir A.
While CO, HCl, and HF, that were considered in the first part of this work, have distinct absorption lines in high-resolution spectra and were detected four decades ago, the lines of HDO, OCS, and SO 2 are either very weak or blended by the telluric lines and have not been observed previously by ground-based infrared spectroscopy at the…
Subsurface heat transfer on Enceladus: Conditions under which melting occurs
Ingersoll, Andrew P.; Pankine, Alexey A.
Given the heat that is reaching the surface from the interior of Enceladus, we ask whether liquid water is likely and at what depth it might occur. The heat may be carried by thermal conduction through the solid ice, by the vapor as it diffuses through a porous matrix, or by the vapor flowing upward through open cracks. The vapor carries latent he…
Thermal structure and composition of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from high-resolution thermal imaging
Fletcher, Leigh N.; Hayward, T. L.; Irwin, P. G. J. +11 more
Thermal-IR imaging from space-borne and ground-based observatories was used to investigate the temperature, composition and aerosol structure of Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) and its temporal variability between 1995 and 2008. An elliptical warm core, extending over 8° of longitude and 3° of latitude, was observed within the cold anticyclonic vor…
Persistent rings in and around Jupiter’s anticyclones - Observations and theory
de Pater, Imke; Wong, Michael H.; Luszcz-Cook, Statia +5 more
We present observations and theoretical calculations to derive the vertical structure of and secondary circulation in jovian vortices, a necessary piece of information to ultimately explain the red color in the annular ring inside Jupiter's Oval BA. The observations were taken with the near-infrared detector NIRC2 coupled to the adaptive optics sy…