Investigation 5:

Using Clouds and Climates of the Solar System
as a Testbed for Exoplanets

PIs: 

• Tyler Robinson, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, UArizona
• Franck Montmessin, Laboratoire Atmospheres Universite de Versailles, CNRS

Summary:

Clouds, hazes, and dusts have profound impacts on the climate and spectral observables of nearly all planets both inside and outside the solar system. However, models for the formation and evolution of aerosols in solar system atmospheres, as well as commonly-adopted models for representing clouds/hazes within exoplanet remote sensing frameworks, sorely need detailed validation against ground-truthed data. Fortunately, solar system occultation observations provide a sensitive and unique path forward for understanding aerosol atmospheric structures. We propose to analyze a broad, high-quality collection of occultation observations at Mars and Titan (and, later, expanding to Venus, Earth, Saturn, and Pluto) to uncover a diversity of cloud, haze, and dust structures. Our derived database of aerosol vertical profiles will then be used to both improve tools for studying Martian climate and habitability as well as to validate approaches to parameterizing cloud/haze effects in exoplanet atmospheric remote sensing models.