Temperature Measurements?, Do Spirit and Oppy report air temperatures on a regular basis? Options

[antoniseb]

Do Spirit and Oppy report air temperatures on a regular basis?

I've assumed they do, but I don't recall ever seeing any kind of report showing the day-to-day changes.
Over on BAUTForum, someone is asking about the temperature, and it would be nice to have a non-guess answer about the difference between the temp at aphelion and perihelion.

Thanks in advance.

[Astro0]

The Rovers don't carry instruments to determine air temperature as such.
The best you can generally say is that it ranges from 'cold to really, really cold'.
On board instruments can provide an inferred temperature range.

One of the goals of the Rover mission is to characterise the daily weather conditions through observations.
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/science/goal2-results.html

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's MARCI Instrument is designed to further observe weather conditions on the planet.
http://www.msss.com/msss_images/latest_weather.html

In general, across the Mars year, it is estimated that temperatures vary from a high of 20°C (68°F) to a low of -140°C (-220°F). Average temperature is -63 °C (-81 °F).

Google is your friend!

[mwolff]

The Rovers don't carry instruments to determine air temperature as such.
The best you can generally say is that it ranges from 'cold to really, really cold'.
On board instruments can provide an inferred temperature range.

Google is your friend!

This is not quite true. Using Mini-TES observations of the surface, one can derive an "average" air temperature in the bottom 1.5 meter that is sampled along the path...by modeling the 15-micron CO2 with standard radiative transfer techniques (i.e., you need a combination of absorption and emission...but it is mainly an absorption effect by the colder air against the "warmer" surface for the day; the reverse for night). This works for most of the day and at night when there is enough surface-atmosphere thermal contrast. The science team has done this for the period when there was useful MiniTES data; I will dig this up and post a link to something that can be downloaded.

The science team always talked about correlating this with the onboard sensors -- which suffer from being inside the rover in some and thus not isolated from such thermal effects (even the one in the APXS probably has some contamination in it) -- in order to derive a calibration. However, I don't think that any one actually did this (on the science side).