Global observations and modeling of the ionosphere, thermosphere and mesosphere

The Imaging Spectrometric Observatory (ISO) flown on the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science (ATLAS) 1 mission between 24 Mar 1992 and 2 Apr 1992, acquired a database designed to study several outstanding problems in the ionosphere, thermosphere and mesosphere. In this paper we discuss the goals and preliminary results from three of these studies. To support these studies, the ISO acquired a database of: (1) emissions for the retrieval of neutral and ion densities to test global models of the ionosphere and thermosphere; (2) emissions for the retrieval of mesospheric composition of major and minor constituents needed to test models of the oxygen-hydrogen photochemistry, (3) emissions of the bands of the metastable states of O2, and O(S-1) produced by three-body recombination of O in the mesosphere.