Dust aerosol, clouds, and the atmospheric optical depth record over 5 Mars years of the Mars Exploration Rover mission

By Mark T. Lemmon, Michael J. Wolff, James F. Bell III, Michael D. Smith, B. Cantor, Peter H. Smith. 2014

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Dust aerosol plays a fundamental role in the behavior and evolution of the martian atmosphere. The first five Mars years of Mars Exploration Rover data provide an unprecedented record of the dust load at two sites. This record is useful for characterization of the atmosphere at the sites and as ground truth for orbital observations. Atmospheric extinction optical depths have been derived from solar images after calibration and correction for time-varying dust that has accumulated on the camera windows. The record includes local, regional, and globally extensive dust storms. Comparison with contemporaneous thermal infrared data suggests significant variation in the size of the dust aerosols, with a 1 μm effective radius during northern summer and a 2 μm effective radius at the onset of a dust lifting event. The solar longitude ( L S ) 20–136° period is also characterized by the presence of cirriform clouds at the Opportunity site, especially near L S = 50° and 115°. In addition to water ice clouds, a water ice haze may also be present, and carbon dioxide clouds may be present early in the season. Variations in dust opacity are important to the energy balance of each site, and work with seasonal variations in insolation to control dust devil frequency at the Spirit site.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a90b2a26dd15c80129c53cfb68926460f42b57c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The Modern Near-Surface Martian Climate: A Review of In-situ Meteorological Data from Viking to Curiosity (2017, methodology): “…contribute to the atmospheric opacity, such as during the aphelion cloud belt or at the edges of the polar caps (Toigo and Richardson 2000; Smith 2004; Madeleine et al. 2012; Lemmon et al. 2015), their effect on the solar insolation at the surface is generally minor compared to that of the dust.”
Eight-year climatology of dust optical depth on Mars (2014, methodology): “Lemmon et al. (2015) have retrieved CDOD from upward-looking observations at wavelengths centered around 880 nm (near IR) and 440 nm (visible blue).”
The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover Mastcam instruments: Preflight and in‐flight calibration, validation, and data archiving (2017, background): “…L7 and R7 solar neutral density-coated filters [Lemmon, 2014], timed to characterize the history of atmospheric dust opacity in Gale crater as compared to the long-term record of opacity derived from similar kinds of direct solar imaging from other rover and lander sites [Lemmon et al., 2015].”