An uppermost haze layer above 100 km found over Venus by the SOIR instrument onboard Venus Express

Autor: Seiko Takagi, Arnaud Mahieux, Valérie Wilquet, Séverine Robert, Ann Carine Vandaele, Naomoto Iwagami
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Earth, Planets and Space, Vol 71, Iss 1, Pp 1-12 (2019)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1880-5981
DOI: 10.1186/s40623-019-1103-x
Popis: Abstract The Solar Occultation in the InfraRed (SOIR) instrument onboard Venus Express was designed to measure the Venusian atmospheric transmission at high altitudes (65–220 km) in the infrared range (2.2–4.3 μm) with a high spectral resolution. In this work, we investigate the optical properties of Venus’s haze layer above 90 km using SOIR solar occultation observations. Vertical and latitudinal profiles of the extinction coefficient, optical thickness, and mixing ratio of aerosols are retrieved. One of the most remarkable results is that the aerosol mixing ratio tends to increase with altitude above 90 km at both high and low latitudes. We speculate how aerosols could be produced at such high altitudes.
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