Mapping of Ozone on Mars at Infrared Wavelengths Using Crires at VLT

Details Mapping of Ozone on Mars at Infrared Wavelengths Using Crires at VLT Mapping of Ozone on Mars at Infrared Wavelengths Using Crires at VLT

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.p53e1560r&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #P53E-1560

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

[0343] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Planetary Atmospheres, [6225] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Mars

Scientific paper

We present spatially resolved maps of ozone and water on Mars, acquired on 21 August 2009 using the ultra-high resolution infrared spectrometer CRIRES at ESO’s VLT (Paranal, Chile). On Mars, the season was mid-summer in the South (Ls = 325) and the latitudinal resolution was 10 degrees FWHM at disk center. Ozone is produced by recombination of photochemically produced O and O2. It is destroyed by UV photolysis (with O2 (a1Dg) as a principal product) but also by reaction with odd hydrogen species (especially, H - a product of H2O vapor photolysis). Thus, simultaneous measurements of water and ozone can test this relationship. We quantified ozone using spectral lines (near 1.27 mm) of O2 (a1Dg). The emission from O2 (a1Dg) serves as a tracer for O3 above 20 km, since at lower altitudes collisions with CO2 quench the excited O2 (a1Dg) molecules. We confirmed the vertical location of the O2 (a1Dg) emission by extracting rotational temperatures from line-by-line ratios, and comparing them with standard vertical temperature profiles for this season and location(s). On the same night, we also obtained 2-D (lat-long) maps of Martian water from multiple H2O lines detected in the 3.3 mm region. We compare our retrieved distributions for ozone (latitude and altitude) with predictions of Lefevre et al. [I] based on their comprehensive 3-D circulation and photochemical model for the Martian atmosphere. Acknowledgements: This work was funded by NASA’s R&A Programs in Astrobiology (344-53-51), Planetary Astronomy (344-32-51-96), and Planetary Atmospheres (NNX09AB65G). We gratefully acknowledge the Director and staff of the European Southern Observatory, for supporting these observations. References: [I] Lefevre et al. (2004), J. of Geophys. Res. 109, E07004

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