08/04/2022
Responding to the initiative of the European Commission’s Director-General for Research and Innovation, asking for your support to researchers from Ukraine, the IASB-BIRA team of RoadMap has expressed its support by announcing research opportunities for researchers or other specialists from Ukraine.
We offer opportunities for traineeship and internship in the "Planetary Atmospheres" research group at the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, located in Brussels (Belgium). The work proposed is in support of the RoadMap H2020 project, including research activities linked to the role of dust and clouds on planetary atmospheres in particular that of Mars (space data analysis, radiative transfer modelling, micro-physics modelling) and IT or software development activities (optimisation of codes, website development, data centre through the web). The positions will be open from April to September. The contracts will be for a duration of one year, renewable.
More information on:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/ua-opportunities
The video interviews of nine members of the RoadMap team have been published on BIRA-IASB's YouTube channel and shared on the Institute's social media, under the hashtags #RoadMapMarsDust and #RoadMapTeam.
As part of the efforts to communicate the goals and results of the H2020 RoadMap project to the general public, an animation has been developed and interviews with several of the team members have been recorded. The animation and the general introduction of the RoadMap project, given by Dr Ann Carine Vandaele of the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, have been published on BIRA-IASB's YouTube channel and shared on the Institute's social media. The rest of the interviews with the various team members will be published over the course of December 2021, under the hashtags #RoadMapMarsDust and #RoadMapTeam.
RoadMap Animated Introduction (December 3, 2021) |
Introduction of the project by Dr Ann Carine Vandaele (December 3, 2021) |
The second round of video interviews, presenting three of the RoadMap team's members, have been published on BIRA-IASB's YouTube channel and shared on the Institute's social media. The rest of the interviews with the various team members will be published over the course of December 2021, under the hashtags #RoadMapMarsDust and #RoadMapTeam.
RoadMap Team: Teresa Jardiel (December 10, 2021) |
RoadMap Team: Olga Muñoz (December 10, 2021) |
RoadMap Team:Julia Martikainen (December 10, 2021) |
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By combining observations from three international spacecraft at Mars, scientists were able to show that regional dust storms play a huge role in drying out the Red Planet.
Dust storms heat up higher altitudes of the cold Martian atmosphere, preventing water vapor from freezing as usual and allowing it to reach farther up. In the higher reaches of Mars, where the atmosphere is sparse, water molecules are left vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation, which breaks them up into their lighter components of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen, which is the lightest element, is easily lost to space, with oxygen either escaping or settling back to the surface.
“All you have to do to lose water permanently is to lose one hydrogen atom because then the hydrogen and oxygen can’t recombine into water,” said Michael S. Chaffin, a researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So when you’ve lost a hydrogen atom, you’ve definitely lost a water molecule.”
Scientists have long suspected that Mars, once warm and wet like Earth, has lost most of its water largely through this process, but they didn’t realize the significant impact of regional dust storms, which happen nearly every summer in the planet’s southern hemisphere. Globe-enveloping dust storms that strike typically every three to four Martian years were thought to be the main culprits, along with the hot summer months in the southern hemisphere when Mars is closer to the Sun.
But the Martian atmosphere also gets heated during smaller, regional dust storms, according to a new paper published August 16 in the journal Nature Astronomy. The researchers, an international team led by Chaffin, found that Mars loses double the amount of water during a regional storm as it does during a southern summer season without regional storms.
“This paper helps us virtually go back in time and say, ‘OK, now we have another way to lose water that will help us relate this little water we have on Mars today with the humongous amount of water we had in the past,” said Geronimo Villanueva, a Martian water expert at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-author on Chaffin’s paper.
The full press release can be found on the NASA website here
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