Using Space Apparatus for Sensing of Top Ionosphere

The planned ISS-Glonass experiment includes several variants of monitoring of Earth's ionosphere. First option uses triple-band transceiver installed on board of international space station (ISS) to record coherent signals with frequencies 150 MHz, 400 MHz and 1067 MHz emitted by navigation spacecrafts of Tsicada or Transit types. Another concurrent experiment of ionosphere sensing uses the same transceiver in transmit mode. Emitted signal is registered by ground-based receiving stations (RS). After post-processing, these experiments provide the total electron content (TEC) distribution in the limited predefined region of Earths atmosphere. First setup yields results for upper ionosphere layer, while second setup for the lower one.