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| The Department Graduate Students Spacecraft Missions |
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Lyle Broadfoot, on airglow experiments About 1986 my group started to get involved with the U.S. Air Force. That’s when we started to build experiments for the shuttle. We did ground-based experiments as well at the AMOS [Air Force Maui Optical Station]. We didn’t do much ground-based other than this work we did with the Air Force. But it was still flight data—flight-based—because what we were doing was observing the shuttle as it flew over the optical station. With their instrumentation—and we had our instrumentation tied to theirs—we would observe the airglow emissions. Airglow means that something is active in the atmosphere, like the aurora. The aurora occurs because electrons, protons, are trapped in the magnetic field, and they come into the atmosphere and they excite the upper atmosphere. The emission changes as a function of altitude, and by observing the optical emissions we can say something about the density of the atmosphere at that moment. What we were doing with the shuttle was they were firing their thrusters, and they were turning their thrusters to the ram direction to point their thrusters forward and fire them, and we were observing them to see what the interaction of the thrusters with the atmosphere was. So this is airglow. We had the shuttle do different configurations and fire jets in different directions, and we looked to see if we could see a signature that would be useful. |
Of course, this was all before the Berlin Wall came down. Once the Cold War was over, that program started to slow down. At that time what we were trying to do is get signatures that would allow us to identify types of rockets and stuff that might fly over from some unknown location in the Soviet Union. So that work kind of slowed down. But we continued to do airglow. The advantage to us working with them was that the experiments we did working for the Air Force only took two or three days—or probably just one day, because there’s not too much going on. The rest of the time—because we were usually up for seven to ten days—we used our instruments to look at different airglows in different directions; watch the airglow as the sun sets, and see what we could see in the night sky, and that type of thing. We worked on trying to tie that in to atmospheric models, trying to figure out how different things move around in the atmosphere. |
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