Automation of the gate scanning mechanism of the multi-wavelength dayglow photometer using LabVIEW

The Multiwavelength Dayglow Photometer (MWDPM) is a unique optical remote sensing instrument capable of making near simultaneous measurements of three different airglow emissions, emanating at different altitude region of the Earth´s near space. As is known such emissions serve as a perfect tracer for the processes occurring in the altitude regions from which it originates. These measurements are widely used to study the upper atmosphere/ionosphere region, which is important as far as the radio communication is concerned. MWDPM uses specially designed mask assembly to extract the faint emission embedded in the bright solar background, which is several, orders of magnitude brighter than the emissions. At present, the system is automated with a Pascal program, which works in DOS platform and has a separate gated photon counter for counting the background and signal plus background separately. All the electronic scanning mechanisms including the gate scanning of the present system are performed manually. Since the DOS based interfacing techniques are obsolete and not user friendly, it became essential to employ a new Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the system control. The present paper reports the design and operational details of a new LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) based data acquisition system, which eliminates the gated photon counter unit, and manual scanning of the gate values.