The Mars Science Laboratory mission aims to land a car-sized rover on Mars’ surface and operate it for at least one Mars year in order to assess whether its field area was ever capable of supporting microbial life. Here we describe the approach used to identify, characterize, and assess environmental...
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...
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...
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....
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...