36th DPS Meeting, 8-12 November 2004
Session 37 Mars Atmosphere
Poster II, Thursday, November 11, 2004, 4:15-7:00pm, Exhibition Hall 1A

[Previous] | [Session 37] | [Next]

[37.12] Latitudinal Distribution and Seasonal Behavior of Mars Ozone from Infrared Heterodyne Spectroscopy

K. E. Fast, T. Kostiuk, J. Annen, F. Espenak (NASA/GSFC), G. Sonnabend (NAS/NRC/GSFC), T. A. Livengood (Challenger Ctr.), M. F. A'Hearn, T. Hewagama (UMD)

Ozone is an important tracer of the photochemical processes responsible for the stability of Mars’ CO2 atmosphere. Infrared heterodyne spectroscopy with a resolving power of 1-5 x 106 has been used to directly measure fully-resolved lineshapes of Mars atmospheric O3 features from the ground. Observations at 9.6 microns have been made at Mars apparitions from 1988 through 2003 to directly measure O3 as various latitudes and local times. Carbon dioxide features are also present in the bandpass, providing temperature constraints during the radiative transfer analysis of the O3 lines. We present ozone abundance as a function of latitude for various Mars seasons (LS = 40, 73, 102, 115, 202, 204, 291). The latitudinal behavior of the ozone is compared to that of water taken close in time in order to investigate the anti-correlation predicted by photochemistry.

This work was supported by the NASA Planetary Astronomy Program.

[Previous] | [Session 37] | [Next]

Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #4
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.