
Csilla OrgelEuropean Space Agency | ESA · Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration
Csilla Orgel
Doctor of Philosophy
About
80
Publications
17,733
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Introduction
As a planetary geologist I gained experience in various topics in extensive international collaborations: periglacial, glacial and water-related processes on Mars, age determination of planetary surfaces, lunar chronology, stratigraphy of large impact basins on the Moon and Mercury, comparative planetology, landing site studies for ISECG-GER, Chang’e-4, ExoMars 2020 rover, and Mars/Moon mission simulations. I am a remote sensing expert and used data from several orbiters: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express, Mars Global Surveyor, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Kaguya, Chandrayaan, and MESSENGER.
Additional affiliations
April 2018 - May 2018
Position
- Researcher
Description
- I'm studying the impact history of Mercury using MESSENGER data.
Education
May 2016 - December 2019
October 2015 - April 2016
April 2013 - September 2013
Publications
Publications (80)
The density of craters on a planetary surface directly relates to the age of the surface. As the surface ages, however, craters can be erased by subsequent large impacts via direct overprinting, known as geometric crater obliteration. Such counts become increasingly limited as surfaces become more heavily cratered. Techniques to infer the statistic...
This 1:30,000 scale geological map describes Oxia Planum, Mars, the landing site for the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission. The map represents our current understanding of bedrock units and their relationships prior to Rosalind Franklin’s exploration of this location. The map details 15 bedrock units organised into 6 groups and 7 textural and...
The South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin is the oldest and largest visible impact structure on the Moon, making it a high priority science site for exploration missions. The 492 km diameter Apollo peak-ring basin is one of the youngest and largest basins within the SPA basin. We selected three regions of interest (ROIs) in the Apollo basin for which the l...
With the renewed interest for lunar surface exploration, the European Space Agency envisions to stimulate the creation of lunar communications and navigation services (LCNS) to enable, among others, autonomous navigation capabilities for lunar rovers. As the number of satellites foreseen in such a service is much smaller compared to Earth based glo...
We present the geography of Oxia Planum, the landing site for the ExoMars 2022 mission. This map provides the planetary science community with a framework to understand this, until recently, unexplored area. The map comprises (1) a mosaic of the panchromatic Context Camera (CTX) Digital Elevation Models (DEM) and Ortho Rectified Images (ORI) contro...
The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars platform and rover mission will have complex interactions with the martian surface. In order to plan and perform landing, roving and scientific operations, the morphological characteristics of the terrain surrounding the rover need to be characterized from the decameter to the centimeter spatial scale. The smallest possibl...
While the vast majority of ESA’s funding for Mars exploration in the 2020s is planned to be invested in ExoMars and Mars Sample Return, there is an interest to assess the possibility of implementing a small mission to Mars in parallel with, or soon after, the completion of the MSR programme. A study was undertaken in the Concurrent Design Facility...
Impact crater records on planetary surfaces are often analyzed for their spatial randomness. Generalized approaches such as the mean second closest neighbor distance (M2CND) and standard deviation of adjacent area (SDAA) are available via a software tool but do not take the influence of the planetary curvature into account in the current implementa...
Mars Polar Science is an integrated, compelling system that serves as a nearby analogue to numerous other planets, supports human exploration, and habitability. Mars possesses the closest and most easily accessible layered ice deposits outside of Earth, and accessing those layers to read the climate record would be a triumph for planetary science.
After the successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, both NASA and ESA initiated a selection process for potential landing sites for the Mars2020 and ExoMars missions, respectively. Two ellipses located in the Mawrth Vallis region were proposed and evaluated during a series of meetings (3 for Mars2020 mission and 5 for ExoMars). We de...
Mercury has one of the best‐preserved impact records in the inner solar system due to the absence of an atmosphere and relatively unmodified ancient surface. However, our knowledge of the early impact record and the nature of the impacting projectiles are far from complete. To get a better understanding of the early impact history, we examined larg...
The crater record of a planetary surface unit is often analyzed by its cumulative size‐frequency distribution (CSFD). Measuring CSFDs involves traditional approaches, such as traditional crater counting (TCC) and buffered crater counting (BCC), as well as geometric corrections, such as nonsparseness correction (NSC) and buffered nonsparseness corre...
After the successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, both NASA and ESA initiated a selection process for potential landing sites for the Mars2020 and ExoMars missions, respectively. Two ellipses located in the Mawrth Vallis region were proposed and evaluated during a series of meetings (three for Mars2020 mission and five for ExoMars)...
Introduction: Mawrth Vallis displays a unique set of accessible phyllosilicate-rich materials on Mars. The region is believed to harbor one of the most promising locations for the search for past and present life on the red planet. Besides the mineralogy, the stratification of the rocks observable over a large area offers a particular opportunity t...
We used a grid‐mapping technique to analyze the distribution of 13 water‐ and ice‐related landforms in Acidalia Planitia as part of a joint effort to study the three main basins in the northern lowlands of Mars, that is, Acidalia, Utopia, and Arcadia Planitiae. The landforms were mapped at full Context Camera resolution along a 300‐km‐wide strip fr...
This work in Utopia Planitia is the first continuous regional mapping of ice‐related landforms integrated into an effort to study the three main basins (Arcadia, Acidalia, and Utopia Planitiae) in the northern plains. The distribution and morphotypes of these landforms, SHAllow RADar detections, and crater size‐frequency distribution measurements (...
A project of mapping ice‐related landforms was undertaken to understand the role of subsurface ice in the northern plains. This work is the first continuous regional mapping from CTX (ConTeXt Camera, 6 m/pixel; Malin et al., 2007) imagery in Arcadia Planitia along a strip 300 km across stretching from 30°N to 80°N centered on the 170°W line of long...
We conducted a detailed photogeological analysis of the northern portion of the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin (10–60°S, 125–175°W) and compiled a geological map (1:500,000 scale) of this region. Our new absolute model age for the Apollo basin, 3.98 + 0.04/−0.06 Ga, provides a lower age limit for the formation of the SPA basin. Some of the plains un...
This study explores the Design Reference Mission (DRM) architecture developed by Hufenbach et al. (2015) as a prelude to the release of the 2018 Global Exploration Roadmap (GER) developed by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG). The focus of this study is the exploration of the south polar region of the Moon, a region that...
The investigation of the Martian surface through remote sensing allowed the identification of mound-like topographically positive features that, based on geomorphological observations, have been ascribed to different phenomena. New observations will be performed in the forthcoming future to look for possible methane sources, hence discriminating mo...
The analysis of crater size‐frequency distributions (CSFDs) is a widely used technique to date and investigate planetary surface processes. There are two well‐established crater measurement techniques, traditional crater counting (TCC) and buffered crater counting (BCC), and two new geometric corrections, non‐sparseness correction (NSC) and buffere...
Mawrth Vallis and Oxia Planum are the last two remaining landing sites selected for the ESA / Roskosmos ExoMars mission. The primary ob-jective of the ExoMars mission is to search for signs of past and present life on Mars and to characterize the water / geochemical environment as a function of depth in the shallow subsurface. We here present a set...
The lunar cratering record provides valuable information about the late accretion history of the inner Solar System. However, our understanding of the origin, rate, and timing of the impacting projectiles is far from complete. To learn more about these projectiles, we can examine crater size-frequency distributions (CSFDs) on the Moon. Here, we re-...
The increased volume, spatial resolution, and areal coverage of high-resolution images of Mars over the past 15 years have led to an increased quantity and variety of small-scale landform identifications. Though many such landforms are too small to represent individually on regional-scale maps, determining their presence or absence across large are...
This paper discusses operational lessons learnt from the 2013 EuroMoonMars-B (MDRS crew 125) analogue campaign for future habitat operations on the Moon and Mars. The two-week campaign conducted a series of geologic, technological, operational, and human factors research toward the goals of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG)....
Introduction: Many young landforms in mid-and high-latitudes on Mars are thought to be related to ice [1], but their exact distribution and origin are still poorly understood. In an attempt to determine their extent and identify possible spatial relationships and genetic links between them, we mapped their distribution across a N-S traverse across...
Introduction: An International Space Science Institute (ISSI) team project has been convened to study the northern plains of Mars. It uses geomorphological mapping to compare ice-related landforms in the three northern plains basins: Acidalia Planitia, Arcadia Planitia, and Utopia Planitia. The main science questions this project aims to answer are...
This study is part of the activities of an ISSI International Team, which intends to produce new geomorphological maps of the northern lowlands of Mars along three long traverses across Acidalia, Utopia, and Arcadia Planitiae [1]. We aim at identifying the evolutionary history and the stratigraphy of sediments and other material and their relation...
Grid mapping provides a new, efficient and scalable approach to collecting data on large quantities of small landforms over large areas.
Our survey of the Phlegra Montes includes chronostratigraphic assessments of surface units (as function of latitude) and estimates on denudation rates.
The Phlegra Montes, Mars, are located north-east of the Elysium volcanic rise and form a 1,250 km long arcuate topographic ridge composed of Hesperian to Noachian-aged remnant massifs with associated debris aprons and lineated valley fill features. The region covers more than twenty degrees in latitude (165°E, 29.5-51.0°N) and is formed by a comple...
Overview Lobate debris aprons are considered to be indicators for the presence of ice and water reservoirs on Mars and are therefore sensitive to climate variability. The northern hemisphere of Mars is characterized by three major populations of debris aprons (see, e.g. [12]): (1) the Tempe Terra/Mareotis Fossae region [2, 5], (2) the Deuteronilus/...
We present the summary of results of the 2013 EuroMoonMars-B analogue operations mission conducted at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS). The two-week campaign involved a series of operations, human factors, and scientific exploration research towards goals of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG). The primary research obje...
We report on the MARS2013 mission, a 4-week Mars analog field test in the northern Sahara. Nineteen experiments were conducted by a field crew in Morocco under simulated martian surface exploration conditions , supervised by a Mission Support Center in Innsbruck, Austria. A Remote Science Support team analyzed field data in near real time, providin...
We report on the MARS2013 mission, a 4-week Mars analog field test in the northern Sahara. Nineteen experiments were conducted by a field crew in Morocco under simulated martian surface exploration conditions, supervised by a Mission Support Center in Innsbruck, Austria. A Remote Science Support team analyzed field data in near real time, providing...
We have developed a portable dual-wavelength laser fluorescence spectrometer as part of a multi-instrument optical probe to characterize mineral, organic, and microbial species in extreme environments. Operating at 405 and 532 nm, the instrument was originally designed for use by human explorers to produce a laser-induced fluorescence emission (L.I...
Martian caves are regarded as one of the most interesting locations in which to search for life on the planet. Data obtained during the MARS2013 expedition at Hamar Laghdad Ridge in the Tafilalt region of Morocco indicate that even small cavities can display thermal behavior that is characteristic for caves. For example, temperature in a cavity equ...
Abstract We report on the MARS2013 mission, a 4-week Mars analog field test in the northern Sahara. Nineteen experiments were conducted by a field crew in Morocco under simulated martian surface exploration conditions, supervised by a Mission Support Center in Innsbruck, Austria. A Remote Science Support team analyzed field data in near real time,...
Abstract MARS2013 was an integrated Mars analog field simulation in eastern Morocco performed by the Austrian Space Forum between February 1 and 28, 2013. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the system of data processing and utilization adopted by the Remote Science Support (RSS) team during this mission. The RSS team procedures were designed t...
Between 15 and 25 April 2011 in the framework of the PolAres programme of the Austrian Space Forum, a five-day field test of the Aouda.X spacesuit simulator was conducted at the Rio Tinto Mars-analogue site in southern Spain. The field crew was supported by a full-scale Mission Control Center (MCC) in Innsbruck, Austria. The field telemetry data we...
Lobate debris aprons are considered to be indicators for the presence of ice and water reservoirs on Mars and are therefore sensitive to climate variability. The northern hemisphere of Mars is characterized by three major populations of debris aprons (see, e.g. [12]): (1) the Tempe Terra/Mareotis Fossae region [2, 5], (2) the Deuteronilus/Protonilu...
The Phlegra Montes (PM) are a north-south trending ridge and catchment-system northeast of the Elysium volcanic rise. They are located in the Martian northern hemisphere spanning more than 12 degrees in latitude. Together with the Tartarus Montes they form a complex system of ridges and isolated hills that provide insight into large-scale climate-c...
The International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG) EuroMoonMars 2013 campaign was conducted near Hanksville, Utah at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), at sites analogous to Gale Crater landforms. The EuroMoonMars-B crew (MDRS crew 125) conducted a 2-week human Mars mission simulation and carried out scientific studies in the areas of...