21 April 2021 Observations of Mars with ALMA: potential for future constraints of global circulation models
Maxwell C. Parks, Conor A. Nixon, Geronimo L. Villanueva, Michael D. Smith, Alain S. J. Khayat, Alexander E. Thelen, Eric Villard, Steven B. Charnley, Patrick G. J. Irwin
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

Validation of global climate models (GCMs) for planets in our solar system requires observational data, but observations from the orbit of Mars and its surface are limited in number and are constrained by their orbit or landing site. Ground-based observations of Mars can help by providing data across the entire Martian hemisphere, yet historically, ground-based observations at submillimeter wavelengths have been limited to disk-average, or at best, a few resolution elements across Mars. We used Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of Mars to determine the spatial distribution of carbon monoxide in the Martian atmosphere, which can be related to the atmospheric temperature. ALMA’s comparably high spatial and spectral resolutions in the submillimeter wavelengths could allow the mapping of abundances and temperature profiles, and the comparison of these data to simulations generated by the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) Mars GCM. However, the long baselines associated with the high spatial resolution of ALMA introduced systematic errors that resulted in radiative transfer modeling degeneracies. We serve to provide insight to facilitate proposed ALMA observations of Mars in the future so that the systematic errors encountered within these observations might be avoided.

© 2021 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2329-4124/2021/$28.00 © 2021 SPIE
Maxwell C. Parks, Conor A. Nixon, Geronimo L. Villanueva, Michael D. Smith, Alain S. J. Khayat, Alexander E. Thelen, Eric Villard, Steven B. Charnley, and Patrick G. J. Irwin "Observations of Mars with ALMA: potential for future constraints of global circulation models," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 7(2), 025001 (21 April 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.7.2.025001
Received: 5 October 2020; Accepted: 18 March 2021; Published: 21 April 2021
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Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
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KEYWORDS
Mars

Atmospheric modeling

Data modeling

Spatial resolution

Observatories

Calibration

3D modeling

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