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Possible Transient Luminous Events Observed in Jupiter's Upper Atmosphere
Wong, Michael H.; Gérard, Jean-Claude; Kammer, Joshua A. +10 more
Eleven transient bright flashes were detected in Jupiter's atmosphere using the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument on the Juno spacecraft. These bright flashes are only observed in a single spin of the spacecraft and their brightness decays exponentially with time, with a duration of ∼1.4 ms. The spectra are dominated by H2 Lyman band …
Late Amazonian Ice Survival in Kasei Valles, Mars
Hepburn, A. J.; Hubbard, B.; Ng, F. S. L. +1 more
High-obliquity excursions on Mars are hypothesized to have redistributed water from the poles to nourish mid-latitude glaciers. Evidence of this process is provided by different types of viscous flow features (ice-rich deposits buried beneath sediment mantle) located there today, including lobate debris aprons (LDAs). During high-obliquity extreme…
Updated Equipotential Shapes of Jupiter and Saturn Using Juno and Cassini Grand Finale Gravity Science Measurements
Helled, Ravit; Folkner, William M.; Parisi, Marzia +2 more
A commonly used shape model for the giant plants of Jupiter and Saturn is an oblate ellipsoid, a simplified model of the equipotential shape. The ellipsoidal shape models were originally derived from radio occultation data and gravity data after the Voyager flybys in 1979. Through precise Doppler tracking of NASA's Juno and Cassini spacecraft tele…
Compositional Measurements of Saturn's Upper Atmosphere and Rings from Cassini INMS
Yelle, R. V.; Hörst, S. M.; Koskinen, T. T. +4 more
The Cassini spacecraft's last orbits directly sampled Saturn's thermosphere and revealed a much more chemically complex environment than previously believed. Observations from the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) aboard Cassini provided compositional measurements of this region and found an influx of material raining into Saturn's upper at…
Relative Crater Scaling Between the Major Moons of Saturn: Implications for Planetocentric Cratering and the Surface Age of Titan
Bell, Samuel W.
The chronology of the moons of Saturn, especially Titan, has been limited by a lack of strong constraints on the cratering rate, low number statistics for small-N counts of large-diameter craters, and uncertainty about whether impactors are mostly heliocentric impactors orbiting the Sun or planetocentric impactors orbiting Saturn itself. Here, I p…
Mars's Red (575-625 nm) Seasonal Approximate Reflectivity Averaged Over Mars Years 24-28 From Mars Orbiter Camera
Robbins, Stuart J.
The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft successfully orbited Mars for over nine Earth years, its instruments returning a plethora of data that still today form important, key data sets in Mars research. A relatively underutilized data set was returned from the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), specifically the wide-angle component (MOC-WA), despite returning…
Anomalous Phyllosilicate-Bearing Outcrops South of Coprates Chasma: A Study of Possible Emplacement Mechanisms
Seelos, Frank P.; Murchie, Scott L.; Buczkowski, Debra L. +4 more
The formation of widespread phyllosilicate-bearing near-surface layers on Mars has often been attributed to pedogenesis, a process of weathering basaltic soils by continued exposure to meteoric water percolating down from the surface, which can result in layers of aluminum phyllosilicates forming over layers of iron-magnesium phyllosilicates. We p…
Diverse Polygonal Patterned Grounds in the Northern Eridania Basin, Mars: Possible Origins and Implications
Xiao, Long; Xu, Yi; Zhao, Jiannan +4 more
Diverse polygonal patterned grounds are found to occur in the Eridania basin system (a set of connecting irregular-shaped depressions interpreted as a paleolake basin system) located in the martian highland region between Terra Cimmeria and Sirenum. We here use multiple sets of imagery to document diverse polygonal patterned grounds in the fluvio-…
Tectono-Magmatic, Sedimentary, and Hydrothermal History of Arsinoes and Pyrrhae Chaos, Mars
Altieri, Francesca; Rossi, Angelo Pio; Carli, Cristian +1 more
Arsinoes and Pyrrhae Chaos are two adjacent chaotic terrains located east of Valles Marineris and west of Arabia Terra, on Mars. In this work, we produced a morpho-stratigraphic map of the area, characterized by a volcanic bedrock disrupted into polygonal mesas and knobs (Chaotic Terrain Unit) and two nondisrupted units. The latter present a spect…
Spatial and Temporal Variability of the 365-nm Albedo of Venus Observed by the Camera on Board Venus Express
Schröder, S. E.; Kouyama, T.; Imamura, T. +4 more
We mapped the distribution of the 365-nm albedo of the Venus atmosphere over the years 2006-2014, using images acquired by the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board Venus Express. We selected all images with a global view of Venus to investigate how the albedo depends on longitude. Bertaux et al. (2016,