ATMOSPHERIC EFFECTS OVERVIEW D. M. Rote, Energy & Environmental Systems Division Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439 The presentation consists of an overview of the Atmospheric Effects Assessment Program. The main source of disturbance is described as the space transportation system, which would include both liquid-fuel e!d and electric ion rocket propelled vehicles. To transport the necessary materials into space, heavey lift launch vehicles approximately five times the size of the Saturn V would have to be launched once or twice per day for thirty years. The unprecedented scale of rocket activity will effect, at least to some degree, all levels of the atmosphere. In addition, while not as significant as those of the space transportation system, the impacts of the rectennas' structure and operation are also an issue of concern. Starting with the troposphere, where air quality impacts and inadvertent weather modification are major issues, the potential atmospheric effects and our present understanding of them are summarized as a funtion of altitude. It has been found that as the altitude increases, the increasingly rarified nature of the atmosphere lends itself to increasing possible degrees of modification but at the same time, our state of knowledge and our ability to predict the nature of those modifications and their consequences for man's environment decreases. Hence, at the furthest reaches of the atmosphere, namely in the plasmasphere and magnetosphere, where the orbit transfer vehicles will operate, virtually no experimental data as yet exists to support or reject the theoretical predictions of the potential impacts of injecting quantities of mass and energy large compared to that naturally present.
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