Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Sep 1996
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996dps....28.1401k&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #28, #14.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1116
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
New abundance profiles of gaseous sulfuric acid (H_2SO_4) vapor have been computed based on the measured absorptivity profiles of the Venus atmosphere obtained during the October 1991 and December 1992 Magellan radio occultation experiments (Jenkins et al., Icarus 110, p. 79, 1994 & Hinson and Jenkins, BAAS 27, p. 1079, 1995). These abundance profiles are different than those previously reported by Jenkins et al. (1994) due to the completion of new laboratory measurements of the microwave opacity of gaseous H_2SO_4 in a CO_2 environment. While these new experiments follow the same general procedure as Steffes (Icarus 64, p. 576, 1985 & Astrophys. J. 310, p. 482, 1986), a more accurate determination of the H_2SO_4 to CO_2 number mixing ratio is achieved by using resonators with gold as opposed to silver-plating to eliminate unaccounted for chemical reactions. In addition, a significant reduction in the uncertainty of the absorptivities is achieved due to our ability to account for changes in the dielectric properties of the resonators when a lossy gaseous mixture is introduced into them. New multiplicative expressions for the microwave opaicty of gaseous H_2SO_4 in a CO_2 environment are presented. These expressions yield abundances of sub-cloud gaseous H_2SO_4 in the Venus atmosphere on the order of 1 to 3 ppm. This new formalism, together with a Ben-Reuven line shape model for the microwave opacity of gaseous SO_2 in a CO_2 environment developed by Suleiman et al. (JGR Planets 101, p. 4623, 1996), is being incorporated into a radiative transfer model to compute variations of gaseous H_2SO_4 and SO_2 across the disk of the planet from microwave brightness maps of Venus obtained using the Very Large Array. This work was supported by the NASA Planetary Atmospheres Program under grant NAGW-533.
Kolodner Marc A.
Steffes Paul Gregory
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