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High-Pressure and High-Temperature Behavior of Venus’s Atmosphere Near the Surface: A Thermo-Gravitational Study
  • Sugata Tan,
  • Jeffrey Kargel
Sugata Tan
Planetary Science Institute Tucson, Planetary Science Institute Tucson
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Jeffrey Kargel
Planetary Science Institute, Planetary Science Institute

Corresponding Author:jkargel@psi.edu

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Abstract

Though Venus’s atmospheric conditions and composition have been directly measured, the composition of the Venus lower atmosphere near the surface is generally still poorly known. It was extrapolated from observational data at other altitudes by assuming the constancy of elemental composition without condensation (Krasnopolsky 2007). Both in-situ measurement and remote-sensing observations reveals the most abundant components that exceed the mixing ratio of 10-4 to be CO2, N2, and SO2 (Bezard & de Bergh 2007, JGR 112, E04S07). Water and formation of photochemical H2SO4 — and condensation of cloud-forming H2SO4 — is only important at higher altitudes (Krasnopolsky 2012, Icarus 191, 25). In this work, the balancing of chemical-gravitational-thermal diffusive potentials for the ternary mixture of CO2, N2, and SO2, which represent the neutral Venusian lower atmosphere near the surface, is addressed to obtain the composition grading and to evaluate the tendency toward supercritical density-driven separation of CO2 and N2 (Lebonnois & Schubert 2017, Nat. Geosci. 10, 473). Even though dynamic atmospheric systems, including advective mixing, are more realistic, the static cases evaluated in this work provide stationary states where every dynamic process would eventually proceed to. Hence, our modeling is of a limiting case of the systems of interest, which could help explain some indications of compositional grading. The CRYOCHEM equation of state, which has been successfully applied in describing phase equilibria of Titan’s atmosphere and the surface liquid (Tan & Kargel 2018, Fluid Phase Equilib. 458, 153), as well as that involving solid phases on Pluto’s surface (Tan & Kargel 2018, MNRAS, 474, 4254), is used in this work on the supercritical Venus’s lower atmosphere. In the absence of direct measurement of composition of the lower atmosphere, as well as no lab evidence of CO2 and N2 separation under Venusian surface conditions (Lebonnois et al. 2020, Icarus 338, 113550), the results from this study may at least introduce some new concepts that would entail some tendency for molecular fractionation.