Scientific support for future space missions and multimethodological analysis of surface properties of solar system bodies

Abstract

This thesis will include the two main projects collaborations done at the Royal Observatory of elgium (ROB) as part of the internship started in March and lasted until mid-August 2019.

The first project, with the collaboration of the Institut royal d’Aéronomie Spatiale de Belgique (BIRA·IASB), regarded the development of a data processing software to be used in the VIS-NIR detectors characterization for the Moon and Jupiter Imaging Spectrometer (MAJIS), which is one of the ten instruments constituting the ESA JUICE mission’s science payload. After a period of familiarization with Python programming language and a baseline software developed by ROB for UV observations, the data processing software was adopted to fully analyze and process the images from the MAJIS detector characterization. The validation of the software had been proved both by simulations from a model in collaboration with ROB, and (partially) by instrumental images obtained from the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS, France), which is leading the project.

The second project was aimed at improving the general knowledge of the planetary ice caps spectroscopic analysis via the study of Martian north pole; this has been done both to contribute to the understanding of the planet’s climate via the analysis of the temporal evolution of H2O and CO2 polar ice, and to design a specific analysis software for spectroscopic data that could be used in the future for the MAJIS mission. After a new familiarization period with MATLAB and the baseline scripts from previous works, a full software capable of processing spectroscopic data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) and monitoring the seasonal variations of the H2O and CO2 polar surface ice has been developed. The software has been partially validated with the literature, and the results suggest that an improvement has been done from the previous works in terms of processing time and noise reduction.

Both the projects provided enough scientific data for a co-authorship into two different posters for the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland.