Remote sensing of the thermosphere, plasmasphere, and exosphere

An instrument package for remotely measuring thermospheric, exospheric, and plasmaspheric structure and composition is described. This instrument will be flown aboard the second test flight of the Black Brant XII rocket, with an expected apogee of ~1300 km. A description is given of the experiment package designed for this flight, which consists of a spectrophotometer to measure He I 584 Å, O II 834 Å, O I 989 Å, hydrogen Lyman β (1025 Å), hydrogen Lyman α (1216 Å), and O I 1304 Å transitions, and a photometer to measure the He II 304 Å emission. The He II 304 Å photometer consists of a layered synthetic microstructure (LSM) mirror tuned at 304 Å to focus incidence radiation onto a Channeltron detector. The high altitude to be attained by the rocket is ideally suited to probe the coupling of the various atmospheric regions through the simultaneous measurement of the altitude distributions of several major thermospheric, ionospheric, and exospheric constituents