An assessment of twilight airglow inversion procedures using atmosphere explorer observations

Abstract

The aim of this research project was to test and truth some recently developed methods for recovering thermospheric oxygen atom densities and thermospheric temperatures from ground-based observations of the 7320 A O(+)((sup 2)D - (sup 2)P) twilight air glow emission. The research plan was to use twilight observations made by the Visible Airglow Experiment (VAE) on the Atmosphere Explorer 'E' satellite as proxy ground based twilight observations. These observations were to be processed using the twilight inversion procedures, and the recovered oxygen atom densities and thermospheric temperatures were then to be examined to see how they compared with the densities and temperatures that were measured by the Open Source Mass Spectrometer and the Neutral Atmosphere Temperature Experiment on the satellite