Vacuum-ultraviolet instrumentation for solar irradiance and thermospheric airglow

Abstract

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 experiment 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. This photodiode system provides a spectral coverage from 0.1 to 80 nm with ~15-nm resolution. The other solar irradiance instrument is a silicon avalanche photodiode coupled with pulse height analyzer electronics. This avalanche photodiode package measures the XUV photon energy, providing a solar spectrum from 50 to 12,400 eV (25 to 0.1 nm) with an energy resolution of about 50 eV. The fourth solar instrument is an 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. The photon-counting CODACON detectors are used for three of these instruments and consist of coded arrays of anodes behind microchannel plates.