P066-0013
Simultaneous Optical/NIR and Radio Observations of Uranus

Tuesday, 15 December 2020
Poster
Peter Gao, University of California Santa Cruz, Astronomy, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, Joshua Tollefson, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, Edward Mischel Molter, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, Imke De Pater, Univ California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, Patrick M Fry, University of Wisconsin Madison, Space Science and Engineering Center, Madison, WI, United States, Michael H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States and Lawrence Anthony Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, United States
Abstract:
Disk-resolved observations of planetary atmospheres over a large range of wavelengths can be used to constrain gas abundances and aerosol distributions from the tropopause down to the deep cloud layers, and allow for the characterization of both the vertical structure of the atmosphere and the impact of atmospheric dynamics. The extreme obliquity and very low internal heat of Uranus make it a fascinating testbed for our understanding of giant planet dynamics. We present longitudinally averaged profiles of I/F of Uranus extracted from photometry observed by the Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 UVIS and Keck II NIRC2 on August 29th and 30th of 2015. We use these profiles to investigate the optical and near-infrared reflectance of Uranus and compare it to models constrained by radio observations taken simultaneously with our observations. We perform a retrieval analysis on broadband I/F measurements from 0.3 to 2.5 microns at multiple latitudes taking into account variations in aerosol properties and methane abundances. The simultaneous VLA observations, which probe down to ~50 bars and measure spatial variations in H2S and CH4 gas concentrations (from Molter et al., 2020), allow us to establish a connection between the deep and shallow portions of the atmosphere.
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