First global extraction of mesospheric Venusian O 3 and SO 2 concentrations from the entire SPICAV-UV/VEX stellar occultations dataset

Abstract : The SPICAV spectrometer was a part of the ESA's Venus Express spacecraft functioning on the Venus orbit in 2006-2014 [1]. Its UV channel worked in a spectral range of 118-320 nm that covered gaseous absorption bands of SO2, O3 and CO2. Observations of stellar occultations in the UV allowed to study nighttime vertical distributions of these gases within altitude range of 80-110 km corresponding to Venus upper mesosphere. Temporal and spatial variations of the gaseous content are able to be analyzed considering the SPICAV dataset accumulated for the entire mission period. In our work we present results of O3 and reprocessed SO2 retrievals based on the whole SPICAV UV dataset. The data processing pipeline was improved since the recent studies [2] that allowed to extend the number of considering observations.