AbstractThe NASA Global‐scale Observations of Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission will study the coupling of the thermosphere with the lower atmosphere through an examination of temperature and composition, allowing the study of atmospheric waves. A key mechanism of energy and momentum transport between atmospheric regions is gravity waves. GOLD is an imaging spectrograph that will measure Earth's airglow emissions (both nightglow and dayglow) in the far ultraviolet range from 132 to 162 nm, including the atomic oxygen doublet at 135.6 nm and molecular nitrogen Lyman‐Birge‐Hopfield bands. GOLD will be the first instrument to make such measurements from the perspective of a geostationary orbit, which creates unique challenges and opportunities for observing atmospheric waves. Here we model the ability of the GOLD imager to detect a gravity wave‐like perturbation from the emergent brightness variations using a combination of a general circulation model and a model of the thermospheric airglow in the far ultraviolet. A 10% perturbation in temperature (±59 K at 150 km) and constituent densities is introduced into the vertical columns of the atmosphere, which results in a ±1.5 Rayleigh perturbation to the brightness of both spectral features, with the same wave period as the introduced perturbation. For the expected total signal, particle background counts, and chosen spectral feature, signal‐to‐noise calculations indicate that integration for several minutes will allow gravity wave perturbations to be observed in brightness perturbations on a single pixel of an image.