Long lived martian geoscience observatory - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2005

Long lived martian geoscience observatory

P. Lognonné
T. Spohn
D. Breuer
R. Garcia
M. Wieczorek

Résumé

If the apparition of life is maybe a rapid process on a habitable planet, the evolution of life toward intelligence is a much longer process and about 4000 Myears were needed on the Earth. What is the probability for a telluric planet to offer the right conditions to life evolution? Why is the Earth the only planet on the Solar System where liquid water was able to be maintained liquid at the surface, and why Mars and Venus were unable to maintain such temperature conditions? What is the level of volcanic ac- tivity on Mars? What is the heat flow and its impact on the temperature gradient in the subsurface? How can we extrapolate this activity in the past and estimate the im- portance of volcanic degazing and its impact on the early atmosphere?Do we have indications for an early plate tectonics regime on Mars with a water rich upper mantle and how im- portant is such a regime in the habitability of planets? Why and when stopped the Martian dynamo? All these scientific questions, which impact on the Martian long term habitability, are related to the geodynamics of the planet and its geological evolution and activity. In order to provide an answer, we need to understand how a tel- luric planet is geologically evolving, which needs a detailed knowledge of its interior structure, of the mineralogy and temperature of its mantle, of the amount of energy re- leased during accretion and therefore of the size of the main units of the planet (crust, mantle, core), of the heat flux and possibly of the long scale convective structure. We also need to monitor its present geological activity. The Long Lived Geoscience Observatory on Mars will setup a permanent network of fixed stations on the planet, op-erating for a decade or more. These stations will moni- tor with high resolution the magnetic field, the rotation and the seismic activity of the planets, will measure the heat flux and will in addition monitor the present envi- ronment (meteorology, radiations, ionospheric properties, etc) and support human exploration. This suite of instru- ment will be able to perform a passive sounding of the deep and shallow planetary interior and to retrieve the temperature profile and mineralogical profile in the planet and 3D mantle lateral variation by a joint inversion of the seismic, conductivity profiles and heat flux and geodetic data. 8 stations, operating for 4 to 10 years will be nec- essary to obtain such detailed tomographic picture of the mantle convection and we can therefore expect a full de- ployment after 4 or 5 Mars windows. Such stations, com- parable to the of Autonomous Lunar Surface Experiment Package, deployed by NASA during the Apollo missions, might be deployed systematically by all the future Mars landing missions and might therefore be an original Euro- pean contribution to the International Mars exploration in the next decade and will complement with the necessary geophysical data the analysis of the future sample return missions. In addition to Roving and Sample Return mis- sion, they also can be deployed by more dedicated multi- lander missions. In addition, such stations might also be proposed to the future Moon landing missions. In both cases, these Planetary Long Lived Observatories will not only help us to better understand the formation and evo- lution of two of the Solar Systems Terrestrial Planets, but will also support human exploration by a permanent sur- vey of the planetary environment.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
lognonneetal_ESA_2005.pdf (126.88 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte
Loading...

Dates et versions

hal-00121392 , version 1 (12-04-2017)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-00121392 , version 1

Citer

P. Lognonné, T. Spohn, D. Breuer, U. Christensen, H. Igel, et al.. Long lived martian geoscience observatory. 39th ESLAB Symposium: Trends in Space Science and Cosmic Vision 2020, Apr 2005, Noordwijk, Netherlands. ⟨hal-00121392⟩
301 Consultations
38 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More