Oral comunication
L. Mendoza, C. Sousa-Silva, G. Sanger-Johnson, S. Fay, J. A. Dittman, R. Giles, T. Greathouse, P. Machado, E. Montiel, T. Encrenaz, S. Aoki, C. DeWitt
Abstract
Claims of the detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus have recently sparked interest in its atmosphere and ignited debate because of phosphine’s status as a biosignature. These claims also motivated a proposal to use the TEXES spectrograph mounted on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility located on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain to produce an infrared spectrum of the clouds of Venus from wavenumbers 1115 cm-1 to 1123 cm-1 on June 30th and July 2nd, 2021. This wavenumber range has not been studied prior and is distinct for its lack of CO2 transitions, increasing the likelihood of detecting less abundant molecules in Venus’s atmosphere such as phosphine, ozone, and ammonia which are relatively active in this infrared region. There have been separate efforts to characterize Venus’s atmosphere, unrelated to the phosphine detection, including a January 2017 observation by EXES operating on the SOFIA Science Center aimed to measure the D/H ratio in the Venusian cloud tops. Here, we present the flat spectrum in this molecularly active infrared region that the TEXES observation produced, both its and the EXES data’s ability to calculate upper limits and abundances for the aforementioned molecules, and to inform the VERITAS, DAVINCI, and EnVision missions on what they should expect to observe when probing the cloud tops of Venus to characterize both its atmosphere and its history.
AGU 2024
Washington, D.C., USA
2024 December
