Scientists are coming up with ingenious ways to compare terrestrial sand dunes, dust storms, and rain with their counterparts on Mars and Titan.
planetary atmospheres
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Asteroid Impacts Could Have Warmed Ancient Mars
Hydrogen released during large impacts might have boosted Mars’s surface temperature above freezing for thousands or even millions of years, enabling liquid water to flow over the Red Planet.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Unprecedented Constraint on the Martian Mesopause Temperature
The middle atmosphere of Mars is a critical region influenced by both waves from below and solar radiation from above, but until now there have been very few observational constraints on this region.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Callisto’s H Corona: Offspring of the Surface or the Atmosphere?
The mostly unknown Callisto’s H corona is created by a global tenuous H2 atmosphere and not by surface water as previously believed, providing the first evidence for H2 in Callisto’s atmosphere.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Ozone, Water Vapor and Temperature: It’s a Complex Relation
Solar occultation observations from the ACS/MIR instrument provide coincident profiles of O3, H2O and temperature, shedding light on correlations and unveiling knowledge gaps in Mars’s photochemistry.
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A Unified Atmospheric Model for Uranus and Neptune
In a new model, three substantial atmospheric layers appear consistent between the ice giants.
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Diagnosing Neptune’s Chilly Summer
A pandemic project analyzing a trove of infrared images revealed an unexplained phenomenon taking place in Neptune’s atmosphere.
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Mars’s Dust Cycle Controls Its Polar Vortex and Snowfall
On Earth, the water cycle is a dominant climate force. On Mars, it’s the dust.
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Young Ponds on Mars
A detailed study of evaporite (chloride) deposits on Mars shows that small bodies of surface water persisted until about 2.5 Ga, more recently than previously thought.
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The Possible Evolution of an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere
Scientific sleuths explore data gathered trillions of kilometers away and put forth different, and often conflicting, ideas to reconstruct the gaseous envelope on a distant rocky exoplanet, GJ 1132 b.