Transport properties of high-temperature mars-atmosphere components

The designing phase of components for vehicles used in the planetary exploration is assisted by the numerical simulation of critical entry or re-entry conditions. In this framework reliable and consistent data sets are needed for transport coefficients of the atmospheric components and also of the species formed in the dissociation/ionization regime, during the vehicle impact. Mars atmosphere has been considered in this paper, moving to higher approximations of the Chapman-Enskog theory for the calculation of single-component diffusion coefficients, thermal and electrical conductivities. To this aim existing transport cross sections databases for interactions involving Earth atmosphere species have been updated and extended to Mars atmosphere components, proposing a phenomenological approach for the derivation of the relevant elastic collision integrals in neutral-neutral and neutral-ion interactions. Inelastic collision integrals terms, due to resonant charge exchange channels, have been considered and the asymptotic approach extended to the estimation of charge transfer cross section of multiple resonant processes.