Minor species in the Venus mesosphere from SOIR on board Venus Express: detection and upper limit profiles of H2CO, O3, NH3, HCN, N2O, NO2, and HO2
- 1IASB - BIRA, Planetary Atmosphere, Brussels, Belgium (arnaud.mahieux@aeronomie.be)
- 2The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
- 3Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado
- 4The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
- 5Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
We report on detection and upper-limit of H2CO, O3, NH3, HCN, N2O, NO2, and HO2 above the cloud deck using the SOIR instrument on-board Venus Express.
The SOIR instrument performs solar occultation measurements in the IR region (2.2 - 4.3 µm) at a resolution of 0.12 cm-1, the highest of all instruments on board Venus Express. It combines an echelle spectrometer and an AOTF (Acousto-Optical Tunable Filter) for the order selection. SOIR performed more than 1500 solar occultation measurements leading to about two millions spectra.
The wavelength range probed by SOIR allows a detailed chemical inventory of the Venus atmosphere at the terminator in the mesosphere, with an emphasis on vertical distribution of the gases.
In this work, we report detections in the mesosphere, between 60 and 100 km.
Implications for the mesospheric chemistry will also be addressed.
How to cite: Mahieux, A., Robert, S., Mills, F., Trompet, L., Aoki, S., Piccialli, A., Jessup, K. L., and Vandaele, A. C.: Minor species in the Venus mesosphere from SOIR on board Venus Express: detection and upper limit profiles of H2CO, O3, NH3, HCN, N2O, NO2, and HO2, Europlanet Science Congress 2022, Granada, Spain, 18–23 Sep 2022, EPSC2022-921, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2022-921, 2022.
