  Interactions of grazing incidence, ultra high energy cosmic rays with the
earth's atmosphere may provide a new method of studying energetic cosmic rays
with gamma-ray satellites. It is found that these cosmic ray interactions may
produce gamma-rays on millisecond time scales which may be detectable by
satellites. An extremely low gamma-ray background for transient gamma-ray
events and a large area of interaction, the earth's surface, make the scheme
plausible. The effective cross section of detection of interactions for cosmic
rays above 10^20 eV is found to be more than two orders of magnitude higher
than earth based detection techniques. This method may eventually offer an
efficient way of probing this region of the cosmic ray energy spectrum where
events are scarce. In this paper, a conceptual model is presented for the
production of short bursts of gamma-rays based on these grazing incidence
encounters with the earth's atmosphere.
