Observing Jupiter’s polar stratospheric haze with HST/STIS. An HST White Paper
Denis Grodent, Bertrand Bonfond, Jonathan Nichols
(Submitted on 4 Sep 2015)
The purpose of this HST white paper is to demonstrate that it is possible to monitor Jupiter’s polar haze with HST/STIS without breaking the ground screening limit for bright objects. This demonstration rests on a thorough simulation of STIS output from an existing image obtained with HST/WFPC2. It is shown that the STIS NUV-MAMA + F25CIII filter assembly provides a count rate per pixel ~11 times smaller than that obtained for one pixel of WFPC2 WF3 CCD + F218W corresponding filter. This ratio is sufficiently large to cope with the bright solar light scattered by Jupiter’s atmosphere, which was a lesser concern for WFPC2 CCD safety. These STIS images would provide unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution observations of small-scale stratospheric aerosol structures, possibly associated with Jupiter’s complex FUV aurora.
Comments: HST white paper submitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1509.01412 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1509.01412v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Denis Grodent
[v1] Fri, 4 Sep 2015 11:39:17 GMT (540kb)
