Study of the Non-Thermal Escape ofDeuterium on Mars : Collisions between Suprathermal Oxygen and Deuterium

Sammanfattning

Mars’ climate has undergone many massive changes over the course of it’s lifetime. In order toestablish how Mars lost the vast majority of its water, we must be able to understand how Marsis losing its atmosphere today. By understanding the current escape rates of H and D and theprocesses that control them, we can extrapolate back in time to model the escape rates under pastconditions. By using the Exospheric General Model (EGM) developed by researchers at LATMOS,Sorbonne University, I have simulated the density profiles and escape rates of H, D, related isotopesand particles due to collisions with hot oxygen particles in the Martian exosphere at the currentepoch at mean solar activity. By adding H and D to the model and implementing changes to theprogram between simulations, I have improved the accuracy of the escape rate of these particlesfrom Mars in the EGM. While my results for H, H2 and HD reflect what has been observed fromin-situ Martian Satellite, MAVEN, future work is needed to include the solar wind interaction for Din the model, as it has been shown to be significant and has been left out of this work.