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STATUS:
05.03.2014
Spacecraft Status
On April 30th, the AIM spacecraft went into contingency mode due to a loadshed event. This occurred after the spacecraft had been commanded to an alternative control mode prior to the lunar eclipse that took place on April 29th. The spacecraft operations returned the spacecraft to normal operations on May 3rd.
Instrument Status
SOFIE: SOFIE continues to operate nominally as it observes its fourteenth PMC season. SOFIE makes broaddband transmission measurements centered at 5.32 μm wavelength to determine the concentration profile of nitric oxide (NO). These measurements show a signal oscillation because of detector temperature variations, that limits the accuracy of NO retrievals if corrections are not applied. An empirical correction was developed to remove this instrumental error, as described in a recent publication [Gomez-Ramirez et al., 2013]. The resulting SOFIE NO profiles span ~40 to 140 km altitude, and are in good agreement with measurements from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) FTS instrument. The Southern Hemisphere (SOFIE sunset) shows excellent agreement between the datasets, with statistically insignificant differences (see Figure below). The Northern Hemisphere (sunrise) SOFIE measurements exhibit a low bias of −18% compared to ACE-FTS. SOFIE V1.2 NO data are now available online (sofie.gats-inc.com), in a single file that contains all events for the AIM mission (go to "data services", "get data", "mission data files"). Note that mission files are available for SOFIE temperature, species, and IWC retrievals.
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