Investigating Modern Earth and Mars Atmospheres with a Planetary Chamber and a Computer Simulation

Abstract

We are entering a new age of characterization of the atmospheres of rocky planets both in and beyond the Solar System. Since, however, obtaining in-situ data is very challenging for planetary atmospheres and currently impossible for exoplanets, we require a new generation of modeling tools to interpret a potentially wide range of atmospheres. Validating such models can be achieved in the laboratory by comparison with planetary simulation chambers. For this reason, we developed and applied a new box model, TERRABox, which is adapted from our existing column model, 1DTERRA, in order to compare the composition of the atmospheric chemicals tested in our Planetary Simulation Chamber (PSC). In a first step, in this thesis, we apply TERRABox to investigate the atmospheres of Earth and Mars. For the Earth, atmospheric models are validated by comparing them with in-situ observations. For Mars, however, in-situ data is much more challenging to obtain. We therefore aim in this work to validate TERRABox by comparing its output with chemical species in a Planetary Simulation Chamber under conditions for modern Earth and Mars