Mission Planning and Instrument Design for Stellar Occultation Measurements of Lower Thermospheric Nitric Oxide in the Polar Night

An ultraviolet instrument compatible with a CubeSat form factor is currently being developed at Virginia Tech for the purpose of measuring nitric oxide in the polar night through the stellar occultation technique. This instrument will allow the investigation of how the Sun and Earth systems are related via energetic particle precipitation in the auroral regions. The work performed in this thesis supports the instrument design and requirements development by modelling the stellar occultation geometry to identify orbit parameters and target stars that could yield nitric oxide measurements during the polar winter at consistent latitudes, to best observe the build-up and fall-off of nitric oxide. The orbit study was accomplished through the development of an open-source tool in MATLAB, the Stellar Occultation Mission Planner. The results of this analysis were used to model the instrument performance and identify the required narrowband filter parameters to meet science requirements. Additional studies were performed to explore system performance for a future flight opportunity.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Aerospace Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Jones, Nicholas Alexander

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Black, Jonathan T.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Bailey, Scott M.
• Harding, Leon K.

• instrument design
• mission planning
• stellar occultation
• atmospheric science
• nitric oxide

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:37779

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/115655