The corpuscular heating effect observed by explorer 6 near sunspot maximum

Atmospheric densities derived from the spin decay of Explorer 6 are used to study the corpuscular heating effect at low and middle latitudes near the time of sunspot maximum. The dependence of atmospheric temperature on a_p is found to be quite similar to the recently revised curve of Jacchia et al., which applies to later times in the sunspot cycle, but also at low and middle latitudes. Both curves are very different from those found by polar satellites in orbits of low eccentricity. Averaging a_p over half a day instead of delaying it by a quarter day improves the fit of the models to the data.