High‐Resolution, Ground‐Based Observations of the Lunar Sodium Exosphere During the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) Mission

We present the first comprehensive set of lunar exospheric line width and line width derived effective temperatures as a function of lunar phase (66° waxing phase to 79° waning phase). Data were collected between November 2013 and May 2014 during six observing runs at the National Solar Observatory McMath‐Pierce Solar Telescope by applying high‐resolution Fabry‐Perot spectroscopy (R ~ 180,000) to observe emission from exospheric sodium (5,889.9509 Å, D2 line). The 3‐arc min field of view of the instrument, corresponding to ~336 km at the mean lunar distance (384,400 km), was positioned at several locations off the lunar limb; only equatorial observations taken out to 950 km are presented here. We find the sodium effective temperature distribution to be approximately a symmetric function of lunar phase with respect to full Moon. Within magnetotail passage we find temperatures in the range of 2500–9000 K. For phase angles greater than 40° we find that temperatures flatten out to ~1700 K.

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