The Arizona Airglow Experiment as flown on four space-shuttle missions

Abstract The Arizona Airglow Experiment flew on shuttle missions 53, 63, 69, and 74, making extensive observations of the airglow on the Earth limb and other emissions around the shuttle. It comprises nine spectrograph channels, three imagers, and a TV camera, all coaligned on a scan platform that can view in any direction out of the shuttle bay. The spectrographs cover the wavelength range 110–900 nm with a resolution of 0.5–1.0 nm. Monochromatic imagers monitor selected strong emissions. Autonomous experiment sequences are commanded from the ground in quasi-real time. On STS-69 and -74, data were enhanced by star and limb tracking. Making a series of exposures as the shuttle velocity moves the field of view along the orbit results in “hyperspectral imaging”, a three-dimensional data array of intensity as a function of wavelength, altitude, and horizontal distance, from which a monochromatic image of the atmosphere can be extracted for each resolvable spectral wavelength.