Ionospheric Monitoring and Specification Utilizing Data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program
Abstract
Activities this year have been devoted to refinement of the ground software to accommodate the very low levels of solar activity, and to continue examination of the robustness of the procedures to recover for single event upsets. Software adaptations to accommodate the newly launched F18 sensor data and the modified operations of the F17 sensors have been accomplished. Comparisons between the data for all available DMSP satellites and from the C/NOFS satellite illustrate that the algorithms are very robust and yield highly self-consistent and high quality data. The low levels of solar activity continue to produce a significantly contracted ionosphere that resides predominantly below the satellite altitude. Such a condition leads to the dominance of H+ is regions where O+ might be expected to be the major ion and to very low densities in the winter polar regions even when the spacecraft is in sunlight. The presence of solar illumination in the SSIES planar sensors produces photo-currents from the internal grids that may be collected. If the photo-current is larger than the ambient ion current then the sensors are rendered inoperable and a sensible signal cannot be recovered. However, when these photo-currents are comparable to the ambient ion current, a degraded performance of the sensors results and correction algorithms can be developed to recover the total ion density.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA538641
Entities
People
- M.d. Perdue
- R.a. Power
- Roderick A. Heelis
- W.r. Coley
Organizations
- University of Texas at Dallas