An Aeronomy Facility for the International Space Station Wednesday 19 June 2002 Apache Group 01:00-03:00 pm

Scientific Objective:

Temporally resolved hyperspectral study of Earth's atmospheric dynamic response to internal and external energetic driving forces.

The availability of the ISS Full Truss Site (FTS) option for research represents an exciting opportunity to advance our knowledge of the Sun-Earth Connection and Space Weather. The attributes of the Full Truss Site allow the deployment of a set of associated remote sensing instruments that will return a comprehensive data set on the simultaneous response of the Earth's atmosphere to many disturbing forces at many altitudes. The FTS is capable of supporting identical sets of instruments will look forward and backward along the same path thus viewing the same region from two directions. This gives the measurements a new dimension, depth. Application of tomographic techniques will add structure to active cells in the plasmasphere, ionosphere, dayglow, aurora and nightglow. Because of the scope of data product we need a small army of scientists (the whole aeronomy community) to be involved in the project. A high priority task will be to provide ground-based sites, optical, radar, lidar, with snapshots of the atmospheric structure overhead. This will add a new dimension to ground-based research. We believe this facility will be as important to aeronomers as the Space Telescope is to astronomers.

For the recent MIDEX proposal cycle we identified eleven science team leaders and teams (43 members) that would be required to support the mission as it was conceived. The primary task of the teams was to interface their data stream to the community.

Science	Leader
Atomic and Molecular Physics	Tom G. Slanger
Dayglow Science	Douglas Strickland
Nightglow Photochemistry	James Gardner
Wave and Airglow	Richard Walterscheid
Tomography	Ian McDade, Ted Llewellyn
Wind Velocity and Vectors	Wilbert Skinner
Auroral Studies	Abas Sivjee
Plasmasphere and Ionosphere	Bill Sandel
Solar Conditions	Darrell Judge
Ground Based Aeronomy	Michael Taylor
EUV/FUV Astronomy	Jay Holberg, Roberto Stalio

• The workshop will begin with a description of the FTC on the ISS and a Strawman instrument complement to demonstrate the capabilities of a possible Aeronomy facility.
  
  
• An important question to be discussed is what complement of measurements from space are required to advance ground based research?
  
  
• What measurements are missing from the Strawman payload?
  
  
• The influence of waves propagating from the lower atmosphere on the dynamics and chemical composition of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere;
  
  
• Where do we go from here?