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

Abstract

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.