Saturn's Stratospheric Oxygen Compounds
Abstract
There are three known oxygenated species present in Saturn's upper atmosphere: H2O, CO and CO2. The ultimate source of the water must be external to Saturn as Saturn's cold tropopause effectively prevents any internal water from reaching the upper atmosphere. The carbon monoxide and dioxide source(s) could be internal, external, produced by the photochemical interaction of water with Saturn's stratospheric hydrocarbons or some combination of all of these. At this point it is not clear what the external source(s) are.Cassini's Composite InfraRed Spectrometer (CIRS) has detected emission lines of H2O and CO2 (Hesman et al., DPS 2015, 311.16 & Abbas et al. 2013, Ap. J. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/776/2/73) on Saturn. CIRS also retrieves the temperature of the stratosphere using CH4 lines at 7.7 microns. Using CIRS retrieved temperatures, the mole fraction of H2O at the 0.5-5 mbar level can be retrieved and the CO2 mole fraction at ~1-10 mbar. Coupled with ground based observations of CO (Cavalié et al., 2010, A&A, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/200912909) these observations provide a complete oxygen compound data set to test photochemical models.Preliminary results will be presented with an emphasis on upper limit analysis to determine the percentage of stratospheric CO and CO2 that can be produced photochemically from CIRS observational constraints on the H2O profile.
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #48
- Pub Date:
- October 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016DPS....4851411R