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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.

Mars --- Jupiter --- Moons --- MAJIS --- JUICE --- CRISM --- Spectroscopy --- Software --- Characterization --- Physique, chimie, mathématiques & sciences de la terre > Aérospatiale, astronomie & astrophysique

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Up to date, no dedicated gravimeter instrument has been included on any probe to a small planetary body. The aim of the GRASS (Gravimeter for Small Solar System bodies) project at the Royal Observatory of Belgium is to fill this gap by developing an instrument capable of precise gravity vector measurement from the surface, in small gravity fields of 10^-3 - 10^-5 m/s^2. In the near future, the GRASS gravimeter is proposed to be a part of the HERA mission to the binary asteroid system Didymos. This work addresses the development of a model aiming to simulate the measurement of the gravimeter after landing on Didymos' secondary body, and an initial evaluation of the measurement feasibility and accuracy using the developed model.

gravimetry,hera,asteroids --- Physique, chimie, mathématiques & sciences de la terre > Aérospatiale, astronomie & astrophysique

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The goal of this master’s thesis iw to better understand Mars and its complex processes and more specifcally to understand if the heterogeneity of the martian regolith may impact the degassing of volatile due to small impactors.To do so the increase of temperature as a result of impact energy is theoretically and numerically investigated. A modelisation of the increase of impact-induced temperature is proposed with an analytcial method : the Murnaghan equation of state.Then a comparison with a hydrocode (numerical method) is considered. To study the environmental effect, the evolution of the temperature following an impact for a martian year is calculated using the Crank-Nicholson method. The effect of the heterogeneity of the martian subsurface is then studied with the use of different plausible scenarii of different locations of interest on Mars. Finally, the results for each scenarii are compared with the depth of the ice table or the clathrate stability zone to assess its destabilization and thus degassing of methane.

Mars --- Impacts --- methane --- Regolith --- model --- Physique, chimie, mathématiques & sciences de la terre > Aérospatiale, astronomie & astrophysique