The data from the infrared telescope (IRT), which was flown on space shuttle Challenger Spacelab 2 mission (July 1985), were originally reported by Koch et al. (1987) as originating from near orbital emissions, primarily H2O. In this study, analysis of this data was extended to determine the collisional cross sections for the excitation of the low lying vibrational levels of H2O, present in the orbiter cloud, by atmospheric O(3P). The evaluation of the contribution to the measured signal from solar excitation and ram O excitation of outgassing H2O permits the determination of the H2O column density and the excitation cross section of the (010) level at an O(3P) velocity of ~7.75 km/s. Contributions to the radiation in the 1.7--3.0 &mgr;m band by transitions from the (100), (001), and multiquantum excited levels are discussed. The findings of the study are (1) the IRT data for the 4.5--9.5 &mgr;m and the nighttime data for the 1.7--3.0 &mgr;m sensors are consistent with being explained by collision excitation of H2O by O(3P), (2) diurnal variations of 4.5--9.5 &mgr;m intensities follow the model predicted O density for a full orbit, (3) daytime increases in the H2O cloud density were not evident, (4) the cross sections for the collisional excitation process are derived and compared to values computated by Johnson (1986) and Redmon et al. (1986), (5) theoretical investigation suggests >60% of the radiation from H2O is a result of multiphoton emission resulting from collisional multiquanta excitation, and (6) the large daytime increase in the 1.7--3.0 &mgr;m intensity data suggests that O+ may likely be instrumental in producing excited H2O+ through charge exchange. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1994