Vacuum-ultraviolet instrumentation for solar irradiance and thermospheric airglow

Journal Article · Tue Feb 01 00:00:00 EST 1994 · Optical Engineering; (United States)

OSTI ID:5094645

Woods, T N; Rottman, G J ^[1]; Bailey, S M; Solomon, S C ^[2]

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1. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States). High Altitude Observatory
2. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States). Lab. for Atmospheric and Space Physics

A NASA sounding rocket experiment was developed to study the solar extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) spectral irradiance and its effect on the upper atmosphere. Both the solar flux and the terrestrial molecular nitrogen via the Lyman-Birge-Hopfield bands in the far-ultraviolet (FUV) region were measured remotely from a sounding rocket on October 27, 1992. The rocket experiments also includes EUV instruments from Boston University, but only the National Center for Atmospheric Research's (NCAR)/University of Colorado's (CU) four solar instruments and one airglow instrument are discussed. The primary solar EUV instrument is a 0.25-m Rowland circle EUV spectrograph that has flown on three rockets since 1988 measuring the solar spectral irradiance from 30 to 110 nm with 0.2-nm resolution. Another solar irradiance instrument is an array of six silicon soft x-ray (XUV) photodiodes, each having different metallic filters coated directly on the photodiodes. The other solar irradiance instrument is a silicon avalanche photodiode coupled with pulse height analyzer electronics. The fourth solar instrument is a XUV imager that images the sun at 17.5 nm with a spatial resolution of 20 arc sec. The airglow spectrograph measures the terrestrial FUV airglow emissions along the horizon from 125 to 160 nm with 0.2-nm spectral resolution.

• OSTI ID: 5094645
• Journal Information: Optical Engineering; (United States), Vol. 33:2; ISSN 0091-3286
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
AIRGLOW
REMOTE SENSING
SOLAR FLUX
ENERGY TRANSFER
EXTREME ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION
IONOSPHERE
SOFT X RADIATION
SOLAR CYCLE
SOLAR RADIATION
THERMOSPHERE
EARTH ATMOSPHERE
ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION
IONIZING RADIATIONS
PLANETARY IONOSPHERES
RADIATIONS
STELLAR RADIATION
ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION
X RADIATION
661320* - Auroral
Ionospheric
& Magnetospheric Phenomena- (1992-)