36th DPS Meeting, 8-12 November 2004
Session 31 Mars Express
Special Session, Thursday, November 11, 2004, 1:45-4:15pm, Lewis

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[31.07] OMEGA/Mars Express Observations of the Martian Dust

T. Fouchet, B. Bézard, P. Drossart, R. Melchiorri, T. Encrenaz (LESIA), O. Forni, F. Poulet, Y. Langevin, S. Erard, J.-P. Bibring (IAS), D. Titov (MPAE), OMEGA Team

The OMEGA spectro-imaging system aboard the Mars Express (MEx) mission covers the 0.35-5.1 \mum wavelength range at a resolving power of 200. Since MEx orbit insertion in late 2003, OMEGA observations have covered a wide variety of latitudes, longitudes, and a third of a martian year. We present here the dust content of the martian atmosphere as inferred from the OMEGA dataset. Three different and complementary techniques were used : (i) analysis of limb observations to retrieve the dust vertical profile at selected locations, (ii) analysis of observations relative to the same spot at different emission and phase angles, allowing us to disentangle dust spectral characteristics from surface features, (iii) analysis of the reflected light in the 2.7-\mum CO2 band to map the dust opacity above 20 km independently of the surface albedo.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: Thierry.Fouchet@obspm.fr

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #4
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.