Precipitating electron interaction with the atmosphere. II - The dayside cusp region

Interaction of precipitating low-energy magnetosheath electrons with the atmosphere in the dayside cusp region has been studied. Both pitch angle and energy distributions of the fluxes as well as excitation functions for selected N2 and O UV emissions were obtained by numerically solving the multiangle equations of electron transport. There is some possibility that atmospheric emissions may be used for remote measurements of incident soft energy flux, because the ratios of molecular to atomic emission line intensities in the low-energy region are quite different from those in the high-energy region.