A rocket tomography measurement of the N2(+) 3914 A emission rates within an auroral arc

A rocket tomography experiment designed to measure the two-dimensional distribution of the N2(+) 3914 A volume emission rates within an auroral arc is described. A simple filter photometer on board a sounding rocket, which was launched during the ARIES auroral campaign, was used to measure the 3914 A aruoral brightnesses at elevation angles ranging from 0 to 360 deg in the plane of the rocket trajectory. The measured auroral brightnesses have been tomographically inverted to recover the local 3914 A volume emissioin rates as a function of both altitude and latitude within the arc. The tomographic inversion procedure, which is based upon a maximum probability algebraic reconstruction approach, is described, and the implications of the results for studies of auroral excitation processes are briefly discussed.