VERTICAL STRUCTURE OF JUPITERS ATMOSPHERE AT THE GALILEO PROBE ENTRY LATITUDE

The vertical structure of Jupiter's atmosphere is examined to better c haracterize the latitudinal region of the Galileo probe entry site: +5 degrees-10 degrees planetographic latitude, One-hundred Hubble Space Telescope images of Jupiter taken with the 893- and 953-nm filters on 13 and 17 February 1995, 5 October 1995, and 14 May 1996 are analyzed, and a two-cloud model of the jovian atmosphere (D. M. Kuehn and R. F. Beebe 1393, Icarus 101, 282-292) is used to interpret center-to-limb variations of bright plume heads and, adjacent dark areas in the latit ude region +2 degrees-10 degrees, For both the plume heads and dark ar eas, the top of the ammonia cloud deck reaches a pressure level of rou ghly 200 mbar, and the cloud has an optical depth of between 6 and 7, The optical depth of the stratospheric haze layer is 0.59 for the plum es and 0.34 for the dark regions, while the single scattering albedo o f the ammonia cloud deck is 0.996 for the plumes and 0.950 for the dar k regions. Sensitivity tests motivated by the preliminary results from the Galileo probe net flux radiometer and nephelometer experiments in dicate that the ammonia cloud deck may have a patchy structure. (C) 19 97 Academic Press.