The NASA Ames Mars general circulation and boundary layer models are used as guides to forecast the meteorological environment of the Pathfinder lander site. Based on these models we predict that for a Viking-like atmospheric dust loading, significant vertical wave structure will be seen in the entry temperature profile above...
The NASA Ames Mars General Circulation Model is used to interpret selected results from the Mars Pathfinder atmospheric structure instrument/meteorology (ASI/MET) experiment. The present version of the model has an improved soil thermal model, a new boundary layer scheme, and a correction for non-local thermodynamic equilibrium effects at solar wavelengths....
Simulations with a Mars general circulation model (GCM) are used to perform idealized tracer transport experiments, which are analyzed to yield estimates of eddy mixing coefficients as well as “stratospheric” ventilation timescales for the zonal-mean circulation. The results indicate that relatively moderate values of the vertical eddy mixing coefficient, KZ...
In late May of 2008, the NASA/JPL Phoenix spacecraft will touch down near its targeted landing site on Mars (68.2°N, 126.6°W). Entry, descent, and landing (EDL) occurs in the late afternoon (~1630 hours local solar time (LST)) during late northern spring (Ls ~ 78°). Using a mesoscale and a large-eddy...
An instrument on the Pathfinder lander has been designed to measure the structure of Mars’ atmosphere during spacecraft entry and descent from ~150 km altitude to the surface, and to measure meteorological parameters after landing for the landed duration of the mission. This is specified to be nominally 30 Mars...
We described a simplified physics approach to generating time-varying global wind and temperature fields suitable for conducting transport studies on Mars. The goal is to develop a computationally fast algorithm that will enable long-term simulations of the planet’s climate system. Thus we use a three-dimensional log-pressure global spectral model forced...
A set of simulations with the NASA Ames Mars general circulation model (GCM) has been analyzed to define the basic properties and dynamics of quasi-stationary eddy circulations in the winter hemisphere. These circulations, differing substantially from those in low latitudes and the summer hemisphere, extended from the surface to the...
The Phoenix mission, launched on 4 August 2007, landed in the far northern
plains of Mars on 25 May 2008. In order to prepare for the landing events and the
90-sol mission, a significant amount of work has gone into characterizing the atmospheric
environment at this location on Mars for...
Mars Pathfinder successfully landed at Ares Vallis on July 4, 1997, deployed and navigated
a small rover about l00 m clockwise around the lander, and collected data from three science
instruments and ten technology experiments. The mission operated for three months and returned
2.3 Gbits of data, including over 16,500...
Mariner 9 and Viking spacecraft observations provided evidence for planetary-scale, wavelike disturbances in the Mars winter atmosphere. Possible sources of the wave activity are dynamical instabilities, for example, barotropic and / or baroclinic instabilities. Other candidate sources are forced. quasi-stationary planetary waves—waves that arise predominantly via zonally asymmetric surface properties....
