Abstract

A joint Finnish-Swedish rocket project, NEMI (Night-time Emissions from the Mesosphere and Ionosphere), is accepted for the HotPay II rocket to be launched at the Andøya Rocket Range, Norway, in October 2007. The launch is provided by an EU-funded programme, whereas the participating research groups supply the instrumentation, which consists of three photometers with filters centered at 391 nm, 500 nm and 762 nm. Background measurements at these and other wavelengths will be provided by ground-based instrumentation. The major scientific objective of NEMI is to study the coupling between ion production in the geomagnetically perturbed ionosphere and the night-time neutral chemistry of the polar mesosphere. We will make a comprehensive set of rocket-borne and ground-based measurements of the chemical state of the mesopause region in terms of the atomic oxygen and nitric oxide concentrations, the night-time production of nitric oxide and its relationship to electron density, the night-sky background emissions from the nitrogen dioxide continuum and aurora, and the mechanisms of the O2 Chamberlain band excitation in the nightglow and its relationship to the atomic oxygen abundance and the O2 atmospheric band.

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