Atmospheric Modeling for OPAL Mission

Opal is a CubeSat mission which will measure the neutral temperature of the lower thermosphere (90-140km). It will do this by studying the O2 atmospheric band (A-band), a photoemission of excited molecular oxygen. One of the goals of OPAL is to detect and measure gravity waves traveling up through the region from storms below. In order to do this, it is important to understand the effects of gravity waves on the emission. This paper will describe efforts made to model the atmosphere for preflight mission simulation