Mesospheric nightglow spectral survey taken by the ISO spectral spatial imager on Atlas 1

This paper reports the first comprehensive spectral survey of the mesospheric airglow between 260 and 832 nm taken by the Imaging Spectrometric Observatory (ISO) on the ATLAS I mission. We select data taken in the spectral window between 275 and 300 nm to determine the variation with altitude of the Herzberg I bands originating from the vibrational levels v' = 3 to 8. These data provide the first spatially resolved spectral measurements of the system. The data are used to demonstrate that to within an uncertainty of + 10%, the vibrational distribution remains invariant with altitude. The deficit reported previously for the v' = 5 level is not observed although there is a suggestion of depletion in v' = 6. The data could be used to place tight constraints on the vibrational dependence of quenching rate coefficients, and on the abundance of atomic oxygen.