Observing Jupiter's polar stratospheric haze with HST/STIS. An HST White Paper

Denis Grodent; Bertrand Bonfond; Jonathan Nichols

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arXiv · 1509.01412

Observing Jupiter's polar stratospheric haze with HST/STIS. An HST White Paper

Denis Grodent·Bertrand Bonfond·Jonathan Nichols

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Abstract

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.

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Denis Grodent, Bertrand Bonfond, Jonathan Nichols. 2015-09-04. Observing Jupiter's polar stratospheric haze with HST/STIS. An HST White Paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.01412

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