TIME EVOLUTION AND THE NATURE OF THE NEAR-INFRARED JETS IN GRS-1915+105

We observed the Galactic microquasar GRS 1915+105 in the K (2.2 mu m) band on 1995 October 16 and 17 UTC using the cryogenic optical bench ( COB) infrared imager on the Kitt Peak National Observatory 2.1 m teles cope with a 0.2'' pixel(-1) plate scale and under good (similar to 0.7 '') seeing conditions. Using a neighboring star in the image frames to determine the point-spread function (PSF), we PSF-subtract the images of GRS 1915+105. We find no evidence of extended emission such as the apparent near-IR jets seen by Sams, Eckart, & Sunyaev in 1995 July. S imple modeling of the star plus jet structure allows us to place an up per limit on any similar emission at that position of K > 16.4 at the 95% confidence level, as compared to K = 13.9 as seen by Sams et al. T his lack of extended IR flux during continued hard X-ray flaring activ ity confirms the hypothesis that the extended IR emission arises from the superluminal radio-emitting jets rather than reprocessing of the X -ray emission on other structures around the compact central object. G iven the large apparent velocity of the radio-emitting jets, by the ti me of our observations the Sams et al. feature would have moved more t han 1'' from GRS 1915+105, and we can place a limit of K > 17.7 (95% c onfidence level) on any infrared emission in this region. We can thus place an upper limit of tau < 28 days on the radiative timescale of th e feature, which is consistent with synchrotron jet emission.