Continuing developments in the search for the Martian atmospheric methane

This work illustrates our latest developments in the issue of retrieving the amount of methane in the Martian atmosphere using the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) data. Starting from the work of Fonti & Marzo (2010), we have carried out an analysis on the temporal trend of the methane content comparing it with the temporal trend of other species present in the Martian atmosphere. We have also developed and applied a pre-processing procedure to the TES spectra in order to retain the best data for the final detection of the methane band and the evaluation of its abundance. The spectra have been analyzed with the same statistical clustering as Fonti & Marzo (2010) but using the band depth instead of the two adjacent emissivity values.