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The H Corona of Mars
Chaffin, Michael Scott
The atmosphere of every planet is surrounded by a tenuous cloud of hydrogen gas, referred to as a hydrogen corona. At Mars, a substantial fraction of the H present in the corona is moving fast enough to escape the planet's gravity, permanently removing H from the Martian atmosphere. Because this H is ultimately derived from lower atmospheric water…
The Quintuplet cluster - A young massive cluster study based on proper motion membership
Hußmann, Benjamin
Young massive clusters define the high mass range of current clustered star formation and are frequently found in starburst and interacting galaxies. As - with the exception of the nearest galaxies within the local group - extragalactic clusters can not be resolved into individual stars, the few young massive clusters in the Milky Way and the Mage…
Interplanetary Field Enhancements: The Interaction between Solar Wind and Interplanetary Dusty Plasma Released by Interplanetary Collisions
Lai, Hairong
Interplanetary field enhancements (IFEs) are unique large-scale structures in the solar wind. During IFEs, the magnetic-field strength is significantly enhanced with little perturbation in the solar-wind plasma. Early studies showed that IFEs move at nearly the solar-wind speed and some IFEs detected at 0.72AU by Pioneer Venus Orbiter (PVO) are as…
Spectral Identification and Analyses of Hydrous Mineral Deposits: Implications for the Aqueous History of Aram Chaos and Melas Chasma, Mars
Liu, Yang
Orbital remote sensing data acquired from the Mars Express OMEGA and MRO CRISM instruments, in conjunction with other datasets, are used to perform detailed spectral and stratigraphic analyses with the goals of better understanding the mineralogy and aqueous history of deposits in Aram Chaos and south and southwest Melas Chasma on Mars. The Discre…
Oxygen Loss from Venus and the Influence of Extreme Solar Wind Conditions
McEnulty, Tess Rose
The purpose of this dissertation is to expand our understanding of oxygen ion escape to space from Venus and its dependence on extreme solar wind conditions found during interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs). The solar wind dynamic pressure outside of the Venus bow shock did not exceed ∼12 nPa, during 2006-2009, while the solar wind dynami…
On ion escape from Venus
Jarvinen, Riku
This doctoral thesis is about the solar wind influence on the atmosphere of the planet Venus. A numerical plasma simulation model was developed for the interaction between Venus and the solar wind to study the erosion of charged particles from the Venus upper atmosphere. The developed model is a hybrid simulation where ions are treated as particle…
On ion escape from Venus
Jarvinen, R.
This doctoral thesis is about the solar wind influence on the atmosphere of the planet Venus. A numerical plasma simulation model was developed for the interaction between Venus and the solar wind to study the erosion of charged particles from the Venus upper atmosphere. The developed model is a hybrid simulation where ions are treated as particle…
Cyclostrophic wind in the mesosphere of Venus from Venus Express observations
Piccialli, Arianna
The dynamics of Venus mesosphere was investigated by using observations from the Venus Express (VEx) mission. In the frame of this work, zonal thermal winds were derived from the VIRTIS (Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) and VeRa (Radio Science Experiment) temperature soundings by applying a special approximation of the thermal wi…
Remote sensing and terramechanics study of Mars using orbital and rover data sets
Lichtenberg, Kimberly Ann
Orbital observations, rover-based remote-sensing and in-situ observations, and terramechanics modeling can be used collaboratively to examine the interplay between material properties, scientific setting, and mobility issues facing rovers on other worlds. In this thesis, these types of observations are used concurrently to identify the surface pro…
Study and Implementation of the End-to-End Data Pipeline for the Virtis Imaging Spectrometer Onboard Venus Express: "From Science Operations Planning to Data Archiving and Higher Level Processing"
Cardesín Moinelo, Alejandro
This PhD Thesis describes the activities performed during the Research Program undertaken for two years at the Istituto Nazionale di AstroFisica in Rome, Italy, as active member of the VIRTIS Technical and Scientific Team, and one additional year at the European Space Astronomy Center in Madrid, Spain, as member of the Mars Express Science Ground …