6 RaaEle Ade ce tel ae ea Ae et latttchee OV eet ae 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