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Comprehensive analysis of glaciated martian crater Greg
Mangold, Nicolas; Forget, François; Berman, Daniel C. +2 more
The 66-km diameter martian crater, Greg, east of Hellas, hosts various distinctive features, including dendritic valleys filled with chevron-textured masses (south wall), and lobate tongues a few kilometers long (north wall). We analyze these features by various quantitative techniques to illuminate martian geologic and climatic history. Crater re…
Lunar polar craters - Icy, rough or just sloping?
Smith, David; Eke, Vincent R.; Bartram, Sarah A. +2 more
Circular Polarisation Ratio (CPR) mosaics from Mini-SAR on Chandrayaan-1 and Mini-RF on LRO are used to study craters near to the lunar north pole. The look direction of the detectors strongly affects the appearance of the crater CPR maps. Rectifying the mosaics to account for parallax also significantly changes the CPR maps of the crater interior…
Noncircular features in Saturn's rings II: The C ring
Nicholson, Philip D.; French, Richard G.; Hedman, Matthew M. +5 more
We present a comprehensive survey of sharp-edged features in Saturn's C ring, using data from radio and stellar occultation experiments carried out by the Cassini spacecraft over a period of more than five years. Over 100 occultations are included in the combined data set, enabling us to identify systematic radial perturbations as small as 200 m o…
Mineralogy of young lunar mare basalts: Assessment of temporal and spatial heterogeneity using M3 data from Chandrayaan-1
Murty, Sripada V. S.; Srivastava, Neeraj; Varatharajan, Indhu
A comparative assessment of the mineralogy of young basalts (∼1.2 Ga to ∼2.8 Ga) from the western nearside, Moscoviense basin, and the Orientale basin of the Moon has been made using Level 2 Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) data from the Chandrayaan-1 mission. Spectral data characteristics of the individual units have been generated from fre…
Spectroscopic classification of icy satellites of Saturn II: Identification of terrain units on Rhea
Stephan, K.; Capaccioni, F.; Cerroni, P. +4 more
Rhea is the second largest icy satellites of Saturn and it is mainly composed of water ice. Its surface is characterized by a leading hemisphere slightly brighter than the trailing side. The main goal of this work is to identify homogeneous compositional units on Rhea by applying the Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) classification technique to Rhea’s h…
Conjugate observations of Saturn’s northern and southern H3+ aurorae
Baines, Kevin H.; O'Donoghue, James; Moore, Luke +7 more
We present an analysis of recent high spatial and spectral resolution ground-based infrared observations of H3+ obtained with the 10-m Keck II telescope in April 2011. We observed H3+ emission from Saturn’s northern and southern auroral regions, simultaneously, over the course of more than 2 h, obtaining spectral images along the central meridian …
Geologic map of the northern hemisphere of Vesta based on Dawn Framing Camera (FC) images
Russell, Christopher T.; Williams, David A.; Jaumann, Ralf +9 more
The Dawn Framing Camera (FC) has imaged the northern hemisphere of the Asteroid (4) Vesta at high spatial resolution and coverage. This study represents the first investigation of the overall geology of the northern hemisphere (22-90°N, quadrangles Av-1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) using these unique Dawn mission observations. We have compiled a morphologic ma…
Spatial and temporal dependence of the convective electric field in Saturn’s inner magnetosphere
Krupp, N.; Dougherty, M. K.; Roussos, E. +5 more
The recently established presence of a convective electric field in Saturn’s inner and middle magnetosphere, with an average pointing approximately towards midnight and an intensity less than 1 mV/m, is one of the most puzzling findings by the Cassini spacecraft. In order to better characterize the properties of this electric field, we augmented t…
In-flight calibration of the Dawn Framing Camera II: Flat fields and stray light correction
Mottola, S.; Matz, K. -D.; Schröder, S. E. +1 more
The NASA Dawn spacecraft acquired thousands of images of asteroid Vesta during its year-long orbital tour, and is now on its way to asteroid Ceres. A method for calibrating images acquired by the onboard Framing Camera was described by Schröder et al. (Schröder et al. [2013]. Icarus 226, 1304). However, their method is only valid for point sources…
A phenomenological model of Io's UV aurora based on HST/STIS observations
Saur, Joachim; Roth, Lorenz; Feldman, Paul D. +2 more
We have carried out a comprehensive analysis of a large set of spatially resolved observations of Io's OI 1304 Å, OI] 1356 Å, SI 1479 Å and SI] 1900 Å aurora taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) between 1997 and 2001. We find that the variability of the observed morphologies can be solely exp…