EFFECTS ON AERONOMY OBSERVATIONS K. Clark INTRODUCTION The feasibility of establishing a belt of up to three-score geosynchronous solar power satellites can be considered from an aspect that is neither mundane nor celestial but which concerns the earth's upper atmosphere. We can ask, what optical effects of the satellites would be important to the growth or inhibition of our scientific understanding of the distant atmosphere? Because the future is unknown, these effects are an open-ended topic, but quantitative assessments of some of the recognizable impacts of aeronomical effects have been published and will be used in the following comments. The deposit of energy by the radio frequency beam coming through the ionosphere occurs in a geographically local region. The region's vertical and lateral extent is limited by ionospheric electron concentration and by beam width, and so the range of its view from the ground is roughly only several hundred kilometers. Significant increases of light emission are anticipated in this deposition region. An additional, different concern is the direct viewing of a well illuminated satellite from the ground, seen permanently from nearly all the Western hemisphere. Both of these effects would influence our study of the upper atmospheric environment. LOCAL HEATING Concentrations of free electrons are greatest in the ionospheric F region' broadly from 200 to 350 km, remain significant in the E region from 100 to 150 km, and are appreciable down to the D region around 80 km. The intense electric field in the RF beam transfers a fraction of the beam power into heating the available electrons en route. The field raises their temperature and, by their subsequent collisions, the energy of the atmospheric constituents. The temperatures, or average energies, of electrons, ions, and
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