Search

Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, possesses an internal water ocean and jets expelling ocean material into space. Cassini investigations indicated that the subsurface ocean could be a habitable environment having a complex interaction with the rocky core. Further investigation of the composition of the plume formed by the jets is necessary to fully understand the ocean, its potential habitability, and what it tells us about Enceladus' origin. Moonraker has been proposed as an ESA M-class mission designed to orbit Saturn and perform multiple flybys of Enceladus, focusing on traversals of the plume. The proposed Moonraker mission consists of an ESA-provided platform, with strong heritage from JUICE and Mars Sample Return, and carrying a suite of instruments dedicated to plume and surface analysis. The nominal Moonraker mission has a duration of 13.5 years. It includes a 23-flyby segment with 189 days allocated for the science phase, and can be expanded with additional segments if resources allow. The mission concept consists in investigating: i) the habitability conditions of present-day Enceladus and its internal ocean, ii) the mechanisms at play for the communication between the internal ocean and the surface of the South Polar Terrain, and iii) the formation conditions of the moon. Moonraker, thanks to state-of-the-art instruments representing a significant improvement over Cassini's payload, would quantify the abundance of key species in the plume, isotopic ratios, and physical parameters of the plume and the surface. Such a mission would pave the way for a possible future landed mission., Comment: Accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal

The composition of meteoritic material delivered to the terrestrial planets after the end of core formation as late accretion remains contentious. Because the evolution of Venus' atmospheric composition is likely to be less intricate than the Earth's, we test implications of wet and dry late accretion compositions, using present-day Venus atmosphere measurements. Here we investigate the long-term evolution of Venus using self-consistent numerical models of global thermochemical mantle convection coupled with both an atmospheric evolution model and a late accretion N-body delivery model. Atmospheric escape is only able to remove a limited amount of water over the history of the planet. We show that late accretion of wet material exceeds this sink. CO2 and N2 contributions serve as additional constraints. A preferentially dry composition of the late accretion impactors is in agreement with observational data on H2O, CO2 and N2 in Venus' present-day atmosphere. Our study suggests that the late accreted material delivered to Venus was mostly dry enstatite chondrite, conforming to isotopic data available for Earth. Our preferred scenario indicates late accretion on Venus contained less than 2.5% wet carbonaceous chondrites. In this scenario, the majority of Venus' and Earth's water has been delivered during the main accretion phase., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 4 supplementary figures

We propose a numerical method to compute the inertial modes of a container with near-spherical geometry based on the fully spectral discretisation of the angular and radial directions using spherical harmonics and Gegenbauer polynomial expansion respectively. This allows to solve simultaneously the Poincare equation and the no penetration condition as an algebraic polynomial eigenvalue problem. The inertial modes of an exact oblate spheroid are recovered to machine precision using an appropriate set of spheroidal coordinates. We show how other boundaries that deviate slightly from a sphere can be accommodated for with the technique of equivalent spherical boundary and we demonstrate the convergence properties of this approach for the triaxial ellipsoid.

Enceladus is characterised by a south polar hot spot associated with a large outflow of heat, the source of which remains unclear. We compute the viscous dissipation resulting from tidal and libration forcing in the moon's subsurface ocean using the linearised Navier-Stokes equation in a 3-dimensional spherical model. We conclude that libration is the dominant cause of dissipation at the linear order, providing up to about 0.001 GW of heat to the ocean, which remains insufficient to explain the (about) 10 GW observed by Cassini. We also illustrate how resonances with inertial modes can significantly augment the dissipation. Our work is an extension to Rovira-Navarro et al. [2019] to include the effects of libration. The model developed here is readily applicable to the study of other moons and planets.

Accurate positional measurements of planets and satellites are used to improve our knowledge of their dynamics and to infer the accuracy of planet and satellite ephemerides. In the framework of the FP7 ESPaCE project, we provide the positions of Mars, Phobos, and Deimos taken with the U.S. Naval Observatory 26-inch refractor during the 1971 opposition of the planet. These plates were measured with the digitizer of the Royal Observatory of Belgium and reduced through an optimal process that includes image, instrumental, and spherical corrections to provide the most accurate data. We compared the observed positions of the planet Mars and its satellites with the theoretical positions from INPOP10 and DE430 planetary ephemerides, and from NOE and MAR097 satellite ephemerides. The rms residuals in RA and Dec. of one position is less than 60 mas, or about 20 km at Mars. This accuracy is comparable to the most recent CCD observations. Moreover, it shows that astrometric data derived from photographic plates can compete with those of old spacecraft (Mariner 9, Viking 1 and 2)., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

The evolution and escape of the martian atmosphere and the planet's water inventory can be separated into an early and late evolutionary epoch. The first epoch started from the planet's origin and lasted $\sim$500 Myr. Because of the high EUV flux of the young Sun and Mars' low gravity it was accompanied by hydrodynamic blow-off of hydrogen and strong thermal escape rates of dragged heavier species such as O and C atoms. After the main part of the protoatmosphere was lost, impact-related volatiles and mantle outgassing may have resulted in accumulation of a secondary CO$_2$ atmosphere of a few tens to a few hundred mbar around $\sim$4--4.3 Gyr ago. The evolution of the atmospheric surface pressure and water inventory of such a secondary atmosphere during the second epoch which lasted from the end of the Noachian until today was most likely determined by a complex interplay of various nonthermal atmospheric escape processes, impacts, carbonate precipitation, and serpentinization during the Hesperian and Amazonian epochs which led to the present day surface pressure., Comment: 49 pages, 14 figures

In this communication, we focus on the possibility to test General Relativity (GR) with radioscience experiments. We present simulations of observables performed in alternative theories of gravity using a software that simulates Range/Doppler signals directly from the space time metric. This software allows one to get the order of magnitude and the signature of the modifications induced by an alternative theory of gravity on radioscience signals. As examples, we present some simulations for the Cassini mission in Post-Einsteinian gravity (PEG) and with Standard Model Extension (SME)., Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, proceedings of 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, v2: minor changes

In this paper, we focus on the possibility to test General Relativity in the Solar System with radioscience measurements. To this aim, we present a new software that simulates Range and Doppler signals directly from the space-time metric. This flexible approach allows one to perform simulations in General Relativity and in alternative metric theories of gravity. In a second step, a least-squares fit of the different initial conditions involved in the situation is performed in order to compare anomalous signals produced by a given alternative theory with the ones obtained in General Relativity. This software provides orders of magnitude and signatures stemming from hypothetical alternative theories of gravity on radioscience signals. As an application, we present some simulations done for the Cassini mission in Post-Einsteinian Gravity and in the context of MOND External Field Effect. We deduce constraints on the Post-Einsteinian parameters but find that the considered arc of the Cassini mission is not useful to constrain the MOND External Field Effect., Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, minor changes, accepted version

The laws of gravitation have been tested for a long time with steadily improving precision, leading at some moment of time to paradigmatic evolutions. Pursuing this continual effort is of great importance for science. In this communication, we focus on Solar System tests of gravity and more precisely on possible tests that can be performed with radio science observations (Range and Doppler). After briefly reviewing the current tests of gravitation at Solar System scales, we give motivations to continue such experiments. In order to obtain signature and estimate the amplitude of anomalous signals that could show up in radio science observables because of modified gravitational laws, we developed a new software that simulates Range/Doppler signals. We present this new tool that simulates radio science observables directly from the space-time metric. We apply this tool to the Cassini mission during its cruise from Jupiter to Saturn and derive constraints on the parameters entering alternative theories of gravity beyond the standard Parametrized Post Newtonian theory., Comment: proceedings of SF2A 2011 - minor changes (typos corrected - references updated)

Two papers recently published in Celestial Mechanics (Krasinsky 2006, and Krasinsky and Vasilyev 2006) have presented a model for Earth-rotation variations, called ERA-2005, based on numerical integration of a new set of equations for the rotation of a deformable Earth followed by a fit of the results of the integration to VLBI data. These papers claimed that this model was superior to any other existing model. The purpose of this Note is to bring to light fundamental errors in the derivation of the basic equations of the new theory, compounded by serious deficiencies in the process of fitting to the data; they make ERA-2005 unsuitable for consideration as a geophysics-based model of nutation and precession., Comment: 12 pages

UNKNOWN