Potential of Electron-Driven Emissions from Hydroxyl to Facilitate Investigation of Oxygen Input by Cosmic Dust to Jupiter

As part of a study of electron impact on hydroxyl (OH), investigations are being conducted into the role of excited OH in plasma processes and the potential for utilising electron-driven emissions from OH for remote sensing. An application is the postulated production of OH by interplanetary-dust and meteoroid ablation in the atmosphere of Jupiter, where the composition of the incoming material may possibly be deduced from the densities of trace atmospheric components such as OH. The approach used was to reproduce and then extend previous computational simulations by other researchers, using in this study an implicit time-step calculation with an adaptive time step. This allowed the same computational model to be used to determine the composition at equilibrium after a long time in the atmosphere and in non-equilibrium processes in meteor trails. It was shown that allowing for dissociation, ionisation and faster reaction rates due to higher densities within meteor trails did not explain the overestimation of water in Jupiter's stratosphere that was found in previous calculations. However, the density of OH was found to be dependent on the processes involved, raising the possibility of using electron-driven emissions from OH to study those processes. An extension of the simulations to include the interaction of photoionisation products with dust constituents and a study of the dependence of the results on the set of reactions and reaction rates included in the modelling will be reported. The potential for using electron-driven emissions from OH to study addition of oxygen by interplanetary dust to Jupiter's atmosphere will be assessed.