The region of the 8200 Å Band of H2O was studied in spectra of Venus obtained with an echelle grating spectrograph operated at an altitude of 14.6 km in the NASA Learjet research aircraft. Taking advantage of low foreground absorption, observing at a time of velocity quadrature, differential spectroscopy with respect to lunar spectra, and spectrum averaging, we establish a value of H2O of 3 ± 20 μ for the total path over the entire disk. This value differs from earlier studies of the integrated disk but supports the low values recently derived from infrared bands and by very high spectral resolution groundbased studies.

These results establish that the average value over the entire disk is quite low but allows that locally larger values may exist as reported by Barker. A more complete description of this work appeared in Icarus21 (1974), 213.