Thermal structure and aerosol content in the martian atmosphere from ACS-TIRVIM onboard ExoMars/TGO

International audienceThe ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), a mission by ESA and Roscosmos, was launched in March 2016. After a long aerobraking phase, it reached its final, near-circular 400 km orbit in February, 2018 then started its operational scientific phase in March, 2018. On board TGO, the ACS-TIRVIM instrument has the capability to map the thermal structure of the Martian atmosphere and its aerosol load at a great variety of local times. In this abstract, we describe our retrieval algorithm used to analyse TIRVIM data. We discuss synthetic retrievals performed for a great variety of scenes to fine-tune and evaluate the performance of our algorithm, then present results obtained from the first orbits of TGO. In a second step (see EPSC abstract by Young et al.), the climatology dataset obtained from TIRVIM will be assimilated into the LMD Mars General Circulation Model to improve our understanding of the Martian atmospheric system