detecting the light of the night sky in mars探测火星的夜空的光.pdfVIP

Vol.3, No.4, 285-290 (2011) Natural Science /10.4236/ns.2011.34036 Detecting the light of the night sky in Mars Nebil Y. Misconi* College of Engineering University of Central Florida, Florida, USA; nmisconi@ Received 10 February 2011; revised 3 March 2011; accepted 27 March 2011. ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper a new methodology is outlined to This paper is the first step to build on for a technique detect the dust content in the Martian atmos- to be incorporated in future NASA Mars missions. The phere during nighttime. In the previous Lander main objective is to acquire information on the Martian missions to Mars, scientists were able to de- dust load and other atmospheric constituents in the at- termine the dust load in the Martian atmosphere mosphere during nighttime. This, we believe, is an im- during daylight using spectral lines of the Sun. portant information, since by knowing the dust load during the night using instrumentation (described below) Since the dynamics of Martian dust storms had by the astronauts, may give them the capability to pre- been determined to be very rapid changing over dict the dust environment characteristics would be dur- times of hours and not days, it is imperative to ing the following day. Another important point is that if determine the dust