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Under a broiling sky the specially-instrumented aircraft, used by LASL in the
Australian-based experiment last month, stands on its pad at Kirtland Air Force
Base ready for a mission.
LASL Team Conducts Australian-Based
Airglow and Cosmic-Ray Mission
A scientific team from the Los
Alamos Scientific Laboratory conducted an airglow and cosmic-ray
mission on a scries of flights out of
sydney, Australia, last month.
Neel W. Glass, J-16 group leader,
was the scientific commander for
LASL’s mission.
Data gathered on cosmic rays and
airglow—a faint, upper atmospheric light akin to the auroras—will
add to scientific understanding in
the specific areas of the structure of
the upper atmosphere, the interac-
tion processes of the upper atmos-
phere, electric field producing
mechanisms, and geomagnetic field
configurations.
The objectives of the mission
were:
(a) To obtain data from an ex-
tended airglow latitude run, including equator crossings, in the
Southern Hemisphere.
12
(b) To monitor an extended cos-
mic ray latitude run. including
equator crossings, in the Southern
Hemisphere as part of the continu-
ing program of latitude and altitude surveys as a function of the
solar cycle.
(c) To make series of airglow
surveys locally out of Australia to
determine the location and character of conjugate photoelectron air-
glow enhancement in the Southern
Hemisphere.
(d) To make an extended total
magnetic field survey.
Although it has been studied for
a number of years, the worldwide
behavior of the night airglow is
not well understood. One of the
major obstacles to a detailed un-
derstanding is the difficulty of
isolating the many variables which
affect its behavior. Systematic measurements from a high flying jet
aircraft can provide a powerful
tool for increasing the understanding since an appreciable fraction of
the earth's circumference can be
covered in a single night, and the
attenuation of the lower atmosphere and the loss of data from the
frequent cloud cover over manyof
the interesting regions of the earth
can be avoided.
Cosmic ray measurements were
planned for each flight of the mission. The flights to and from Syd-
ney, Australia, were almost an ex-
act repeat of flights made to Melbourne, Australia, in May, 1965—a
time of about cosmic-ray solar
minimum. This permitted a direct
comparison of the data taken at
these widely separated times in this
solar cycle. There were two cross-
ings of the magnetic equator, close
to the previous crossings, which
provided further observations as to