Ionospheric depletions at Mars detected by MAVEN

MAVEN has been orbiting Mars since September 2014, completing more than 15,000 orbits around the red planet to date. Due to its ideal instrumentation suite and orbit to study the Martian space environment and ionosphere, it has returned a wealth of data that has allowed the scientific community to understand the Martian system to unprecedented details. With altitude variations throughout the mission, at each orbit during periapsis, MAVEN has sampled in-situ the upper ionosphere of Mars with unprecedented coverage in local time and latitude. During some of these orbits, the number density of the different ionospheric species has shown localized depletions that are still not understood. Recently, Basuvaraj et al. (in press) provided the first statistical analysis of these depletions, and found that their occurrence is independent of seasonal variations, they are detected more frequently on the nightside and also on the southern hemisphere. In this study, we focus on correlating the occurrence of these events with different physical processes taking place at Mars in order to explore the mechanisms of formation behind them.