Seasonal Variation of Aerosol Particle Size Using MER/Pancam Sky Imaging

Imaging of the sky taken by the Pancam cameras on-board the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) provide a useful tool for determining the optical depth and physcial properties of aerosols above the rover. Specifically, the brightness of the sky as a function of angle away from the Sun provides a powerful constraint on the size distribution and shape of dust and water ice aerosols. More than 100 Pancam "sky surveys" were taken by each of the two MER rovers covering a time span of several Mars years and a wide range of dust loading conditions including the planet-encirclind dust storm during Mars Year 28 (Earth year 2007). These sky surveys enable the time evolution of aerosol particle size to be determined including its relation to dust loading. Radiative transfer modeling is used to model the observations. Synthetic Pancam sky brightness is computed using a discrete-ordinates radiative transfer code that accounts for multiple scattering from aerosols and spherical geometry by integrating the source functions along curved paths in that coordinate system. We find that Mie scattering from spheres is not a good approximation for describing the angular variation of sky brightness far from the Sun (at scattering angles greater than 45 degrees). Significant seasonal variations are seen in the retrieved effective radius of the aerosols with higher optical depth strongly correlated with larger particle size.