Atsushi Yamazaki

Context. First identified in 2016 by the Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) Akatsuki mission, the discontinuity or disruption is a recurrent wave observed to propagate over decades at the deeper clouds of Venus (47–56 km above the surface), while its absence at the top of the clouds (∼70 km) suggests that it dissipates at the upper clouds and contributes to the maintenance of the puzzling atmospheric superrotation of Venus through wave-mean flow interaction. Aims. Taking advantage of the campaign of ground-based observations undertaken in coordination with the Akatsuki mission from December 2021 until July 2022, we undertook the longest uninterrupted monitoring of the cloud discontinuity to date to obtain a pioneering long-term characterisation of its main properties and to better constrain its recurrence and lifetime. Methods. The dayside upper, middle, and nightside lower clouds were studied with images acquired by the Akatsuki Ultraviolet Imager (UVI), amateur observers, and SpeX at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). Hundreds of images were inspected in search of the discontinuity events and to measure key properties such as its dimensions, orientation, and rotation period. Results. We succeeded in tracking the discontinuity at the middle clouds during 109 days without interruption. The discontinuity exhibited properties nearly identical to measurements in 2016 and 2020, with an orientation of 91° ±8°, length of 4100 ± 800 km, width of 500 ± 100 km, and a rotation period of 5.11 ± 0.09 days. Ultraviolet images during 13–14 June 2022 suggest that the discontinuity may have manifested at the top of the clouds during ∼21 h as a result of an altitude change in the critical level for this wave, due to slower zonal winds.

We demonstrate a newly designed, to the best of our knowledge, hollow optical fiber coupler for a mid-infrared (IR) laser heterodyne spectrometer that mixes a targeted light source with local oscillator (LO) light. The hollow fiber achieves a high transmission efficiency , not only for a coherent laser source but also for an incoherent blackbody source. The branching characteristics of the hollow optical fiber coupler are found to be strongly dependent on the curvature and length of the input port fiber, indicating that the branching ratio could be designed independently for each input port. Our laboratory measurements demonstrate that the branching ratio and transmittance of the coupler can be varied by coupling a flexible fiber to the input side owing to the excitation of higher-order modes. Using the hollow optical fiber coupler, a high-resolution emission spectrum of the quantum cascade laser at 10.3 µm for our laser-based heterodyne spectrometer is successfully achieved. Using a laser with a hollow fiber and a blackbody as a direct input signal in free space, we obtain the sensitivity performance of IR laser heterodyne spectrometer as 2000–3000 K of the system noise temperature. This suggests that the transmission of a coherent LO laser through a hollow optical fiber has almost the same sensitivity for the IR heterodyne detection as that without a fiber.

Dust storms on Mars play a role in transporting water from its lower to upper atmosphere, seasonally enhancing hydrogen escape. However, it remains unclear how water is diurnally transported during a dust storm and how its elements, hydrogen and oxygen, are subsequently influenced in the upper atmosphere. Here, we use multi-spacecraft and space telescope observations obtained during a major dust storm in Mars Year 33 to show that hydrogen abundance in the upper atmosphere gradually increases because of water supply above an altitude of 60 km, while oxygen abundance temporarily decreases via water ice absorption, catalytic loss, or downward transportation. Additionally, atmospheric waves modulate dust and water transportations, causing alternate oscillations of hydrogen and oxygen abundances in the upper atmosphere. If dust- and wave-driven couplings of the Martian lower and upper atmospheres are common in dust storms, with increasing escape of hydrogen, oxygen will less efficiently escape from the upper atmosphere, leading to a more oxidized atmosphere. These findings provide insights regarding Mars' water loss history and its redox state, which are crucial for understanding the Martian habitable environment.