Design and implementation of data acquisition and control system for multi-wavelength dayglow photometer

Air glow are the faint emissions coming from different altitudes of the upper atmosphere. Airglow is caused by various processes, such as recombination of ions which were photo ionized by sun during day, luminescence caused by cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere, and chemiluminescence caused mainly by oxygen and nitrogen reacting with hydroxyl ions at heights of few hundreds of kilometers. The Multi-Wavelength Day glow Photometer (MWDPM) developed in the optical aeronomy laboratory of space physics lab, VSSC, is a unique optical remote sensing instrument, capable of making near simultaneous measurements of three airglow emissions during daytime. The simultaneous measurements in the multiple wavelengths are very important for studies dealing with the coupling between various atmospheric parameters. Further it is used to study about the ionosphere characteristic, which is important for communication purpose. MWDPM has a complex daytime optical system which is used to extract the faint emission mixed with several orders of magnitude intense background solar radiation. The authors are reporting the design and implementation of data acquisition and control system for MWDPM. The functioning of MWDPM through augmentation is automated at both software and hardware level using LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench), which is a windows based graphical user interface software. The Data acquisition module used for this purpose is national instrument PCI 6602 DAQ module. The calibration as well as the functioning of the device is tested and verified successfully.