ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Radio Science with using Spacecraft-Earth and Mutual Radio Links.

Since our first mutual radio occultation observations between Mars Express and the Trace Gas Orbiter in 2020, we have collected over 300 vertical profiles of the Martian ionosphere. After refining the observation planning and processing chain, we now collect two measurements per week. Mutual radio occultations have several unique benefits over conventional spacecraft-Earth radio occultations, such as the ability to capture the midday and midnight regions of the diurnal cycle, revealing hard-to-observe thermospheric temperature trends and the full response to solar flares.

This presentation will show the key scientific takeaways made possible by mutual radio occultation, and the current progress in extending the technique to surface sounding, similar to bistatic reflectometry, to derive surface dielectric properties.

This talk should also serve as an advertisement for the Planetary Science Archive’s release of the mutual radio occultation datasets to the wider scientific community, followed by a larger release of conventional TGO-Earth occultation datasets.