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T. R. Hanley, P. G. Steffes (Georgia Tech)
The detection (in the near-IR) of gaseous HCl in the deep atmosphere of Venus (Dalton et al., 2000) has provided a possible candidate for unexplained increased emissions at the 3.6 cm wavelength (8.4 GHz). Consequently, new room temperature laboratory measurements of the microwave opacity of HCl in a CO2 atmosphere have been conducted in the S (2.2 GHz), X (8.4 GHz), and K (21.6 GHz) microwave bands at a pressure of 7.2 bars and at two different mixing ratios. The results are consistent with a VanVleck-Weisskopf lineshape applied to the published sub-millimeter line intensities of HCl (JPL Catalog – Poynter and Pickett) and empirically fitted with a modeled parameter for CO2 broadening. The resulting modeled HCl opacity does not appear to be significant enough to account for the elevated 3.6 cm emission. The new model, however, represents an accurate way of calculating the small contribution to the microwave absorption in the Venus atmosphere from HCl.
This research is supported by the NASA Planetary Atmospheres Program under the Grant NAG5-12122.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: gtg237n@mail.gatech.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #4
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.