Radiative relaxation of vibration of the nitric oxide molecule in its electronic ground state (X2Π)

An empirical adiabatic potential for the electronic ground state of the NO molecule (X2 Π) is obtained by fitting with the observed vibrational energy levels up to v=17 and the dissociation energy. Using thus calculated vibrational eigenfunctions and Billingsley's dipole moment function, we calculated the probabilities of the electric dipole transition among vibrational states up to v=40. Beside the conventional Δv=-1 transitions, many higherorder transitions are found to have reasonably large probabilities. Applying the result to the theory of Shuttle Glow, we predict that not only many infrared radiations, but also visible lights such as 0.570, 0.523, 0.484 µm lines have intensities near 1 µW per 1 m2 of the Shuttle's surface.