Dynamic Habitability of Mars
Understanding the dynamic habitability of Mars can provide new insights about the most favorable locations to find biosignatures, as well as the locations that may have most recently hosted life. We are investigating the environmental habitat suitability of Mars across recent times to create a time dependent map of recent regions of dynamic habitability.
Objectives
Determine the global habitat suitability of Mars over different orbital configurations.
Explore brine stability and chemistry globally during the recent past.
Identify areas that may have experienced favorable dynamic habitability.
Resources
PlanetWRF: The Planetary Weather Research and Forecasting (PlanetWRF) is a general-purpose numerical model for planetary atmospheric research, including Mars (MarsWRF).
NASA Pleiades Supercomputer: Pleiades is a distributed-memory SGI/HPE ICE cluster connected with InfiniBand in a dual-plane hypercube technology.
NicheMapR: A software suite for microclimate and mechanistic niche modeling in the R programming environment.
RStudio Desktop: RStudio integrated development environment (IDE) is a set of tools built to program with R and Python.
Research Team
References
Soto, A., Mischna, M., Schneider, T., Lee, C., & Richardson, M. (2015). Martian atmospheric collapse: Idealized GCM studies. Icarus, 250, 553-569.
Rivera-Valentín, E. G., Chevrier, V. F., Soto, A., & Martínez, G. (2020). Distribution and habitability of (meta) stable brines on present-day Mars. Nature Astronomy, 4(8), 756-761.
Méndez, A., Rivera-Valentín, E. G., Schulze-Makuch, D., Filiberto, J., Ramírez, R. M., Wood, T. E., ... & Haqq-Misra, J. (2021). Habitability models for astrobiology. Astrobiology, 21(8), 1017-1027.
This Research is Supported by the NASA Habitable Worlds Grant 80NSSC24K0077