Gender Balance in Mars Exploration : Lessons Learned from the Mars Science Laboratory

Funding Information: Funding: The author has been partially funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) Project No. MDM-2017-0737 Unidad de Excelencia “María de Maeztu”-Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Experimental investigation of the atmosphere‐regolith water cycle on present‐day mars

Funding: The Kempe Foundation (SMK-1934) funded the design and fabrication of the SpaceQ chamber. M.-P.Z. has been partially funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) Project No. MDM-2017-0737 Unidad de Excelencia “María de Maeztu”- Centro de Astrobiología (INTA-CSIC) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-104205GB-C21). A.V.R. and J.M.-T. acknowledge support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW 2016.0346). Acknowledgments: We acknowledge the support from the Kurt J. Lesker Company on its construction. We thank Roberto Mantas Nakhai and Juan Antonio Ramírez Luque for their help in the data processing.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Metabolt : An in-situ instrument to characterize the metabolic activity of microbial soil ecosystems using electrochemical and gaseous signatures

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Middle atmosphere OH NLTE model and spectroscopy sensitivity study

Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

MARSWRF Prediction of Entry Descent Landing Profiles : Applications to Mars Exploration

We are grateful to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for making the EDL vertical profiles of past Mars missions available online through the Planetary Atmospheres Node of the PDS (http://pds‐atmospheres.nmsu.edu/). Alessio Aboudan from the University of Padova is also acknowledged for providing the reconstructed vertical profiles for the Schiaparelli EDL. The simulations presented in this paper were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) Abisko cluster. This work was partially funded by the European Research Foundation (ERF). We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer and Claire Newman for their many detailed and insightful comments and suggestions that helped to improve significantly the quality of the paper. The model data used to generate the figures presented in this paper can be obtained from the authors. We have uploaded the data to the following website (https://atmospheres.research.ltu.se/owncloud/index.php/s/PlZWyxd1T24vl16).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Planetary boundary layer and circulation dynamics at Gale Crater, Mars

The Mars implementation of the Planet Weather Research and Forecasting (PlanetWRF) model, MarsWRF, is used here to simulate the atmospheric conditions at Gale Crater for different seasons during a period coincident with the Curiosity rover operations. The model is first evaluated with the existing single-point observations from the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), and is then used to provide a larger scale interpretation of these unique measurements as well as to give complementary information where there are gaps in the measurements. The variability of the planetary boundary layer depth may be a driver of the changes in the local dust and trace gas content within the crater. Our results show that the average time when the PBL height is deeper than the crater rim increases and decreases with the same rate and pattern as Curiosity's observations of the line-of-sight of dust within the crater and that the season when maximal (minimal) mixing is produced is Ls 225°–315° (Ls 90°–110°). Thus the diurnal and seasonal variability of the PBL depth seems to be the driver of the changes in the local dust content within the crater. A comparison with the available methane measurements suggests that changes in the PBL depth may also be one of the factors that accounts for the observed variability, with the model results pointing towards a local source to the north of the MSL site. The interaction between regional and local flows at Gale Crater is also investigated assuming that the meridional wind, the dynamically important component of the horizontal wind at Gale, anomalies with respect to the daily mean can be approximated by a sinusoidal function as they typically oscillate between positive (south to north) and negative (north to south) values that correspond to upslope/downslope or downslope/upslope regimes along the crater rim and Mount Sharp slopes and the dichotomy boundary. The smallest magnitudes are found in the northern crater floor in a region that comprises Bradbury Landing, in particular at Ls 90° when they are less than 1 m s−1, indicating very little lateral mixing with outside air. The largest amplitudes occur in the south-western portions of the crater where they can exceed 20 m s−1. Should the slope flows along the crater rims interact with the dichotomy boundary flow, which is more likely at Ls 270° and very unlikely at Ls 90°, they are likely to interact constructively for a few hours from late evening to nighttime (∼17–23 LMST) and from pre-dawn to early morning (∼5–11 LMST) hours at the norther crater rim and destructively at night (∼22–23 LMST) and in the morning (∼10–11 LMST) at the southern crater rim. We conclude that a better understanding of the PBL and circulation dynamics has important implications for the variability of the concentration of dust, non-condensable and trace gases at the bottom of other craters on Mars as mixing with outside air can be achieved vertically, through changes in the PBL depth, and laterally, by the transport of air into and out of the crater

Convective Heat Transfer at the Martian Boundary Layer, Measurement and Model

Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

Discovery of recurring slope lineae candidates in Mawrth Vallis, Mars

We thank NASA, JPL, University of Arizona, Malin Space Science Systems, Arizona State University, and The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for providing HiRISE, CTX, CRISM images and related products free of charge. A.B. acknowledges the Swedish Research Council for supporting his research in cold arid environments. L.S. acknowledges the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for her PhD scholarship. We acknowledge the Wallenberg Foundation and the Kempe Foundation for supporting the research activities. Data Availability All of the remote sensing data used in this study are freely available from the Planetary Data System (http://pds.nasa.gov) and from sensor-specific websites such as http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ and http://crism-map.jhuapl.edu/. All the data products analysed for this study are included as web references in the figure captions and text of this article.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Wind retrieval from temperature measurements from the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station/Mars Science Laboratory

We are grateful to the entire MSL Curiosity rover team and to the REMS instrument team, in particular, for their work on the wind data on Mars, without which this research could not have been performed. MPZ has been partially funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) Project No. MDM-2017-0737 Unidad de Excelencia “María de Maeztu”- Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA). The resources used for the simulations presented in this work were provided by the Graduate School of Space Technology of Luleå University of Technology. We give special thanks to Ricardo M. Fonseca for his useful comments and suggestions on this work that extended the horizons of this research from the beginning.Peer reviewedPublisher PD