Coronagraphic Observations of the Lunar Sodium Exosphere (Published)
Remote observations of the lunar sodium corona have been obtained with the Goddard Lunar Coronagraph located at the Winer Observatory in Sonoita, Arizona. Herein, my team reported the results of the 2018-2019 observing campaign. We show definitive effects on the corona - the extended lunar sodium exosphere above 150 km from the surface - of enhanced ion flux onto the Moon as measured by the ARTEMIS ElectroStatic Analyzer. In this project I learned the programming language IDL and how to utilize MaximDL. With this, my contributions were in observational data reduction, structural organization, analysis, and archiving in massive quantities. In this project we report an enhancement in the exosphere due to ion flux is not long-lived after the enhanced ion influx decreases, confirming the findings of Killen et al., 2012. The column abundance is greatest at both the dawn and dusk terminators. The cause of the increased scale height at the terminators is consistent with radiation pressure acceleration anti-sunward. We also observed a shallow decline of column abundance with increasing latitude which is also consistent with radiation pressure acceleration. Although the intensity extrapolated to the surface decreases with latitude, the scale height increases with latitude, so that the exospheric column decreases more slowly with increasing latitude than does a cosine function.
Advisor: Dr. Rosemary Killen
