Berkeley extreme-ultraviolet airglow rocket spectrometer: BEARS

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Abstract
We describe the Berkeley extreme-UV airglow rocket spectrometer, which is a payload designed to test several thermospheric remote-sensing concepts by measuring the terrestrial O i far-UV and extreme-UV dayglow and the solar extreme-UV spectrum simultaneously. The instrument consisted of two near-normal Rowland mount spectrometers and a Lyman-α photometer. The dayglow spectrometer covered two spectral regions from 980 to 1040 Å and from 1300 to 1360 Å with 1.5-Å resolution. The solar spectrometer had a bandpass of 250–1150 Å with an ~ 10-Å resolution. All three spectra were accumulated by using a microchannel-plate-intensified, two-dimensional imaging detector with three separate wedge-and strip anode readouts. The hydrogen Lyman-α photometer was included to monitor the solar Lyman-α irradiance and geocoronal Lyman-α emissions. The instrument was designed, fabricated, and calibrated at the University of California, Berkeley and was successfully launched on 30 September 1988 aboard the first test flight of a four-stage sounding rocket, Black Brant XII.