Overview of the effects of neutral gas releases on high-voltage sounding rocket platforms

Four recent sounding rocket experiments demonstrate that the release of neutral gas from both positively and negatively charged vehicles returns the vehicle potential to near the plasma potential. Early active experiment payloads, CHARGE-2 and SPEAR-1, observed enhanced currents from/to the vehicles during unplanned attitude thruster firings. The follow-on CHARGE-2B and SPEAR-3 payloads directly measured the changes to the vehicle potential caused by both planned argon and unplanned nitrogen releases. The gas releases from positively charged CHARGE-2B consistently reduced the potential to 20–50 V, whereas the gas releases from negatively charged SPEAR-3 brought the potential to between −200 and −500 V. The difference in grounding levels for positively and negatively charged payloads suggests that the gas responsible for grounding is near the vehicle, within a small fraction of the sheath size.     

The Search-Coil Magnetometer for MMS

The tri-axial search-coil magnetometer (SCM) belongs to the FIELDS instrumentation suite on the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission (Torbert et al. in Space Sci. Rev. (2014), this issue). It provides the three magnetic components of the waves from 1 Hz to 6 kHz in particular in the key regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere namely the subsolar region and the magnetotail. Magnetospheric plasmas being collisionless, such a measurement is crucial as the electromagnetic waves are thought to provide a way to ensure the conversion from magnetic to thermal and kinetic energies allowing local or global reconfigurations of the Earth’s magnetic field. The analog waveforms provided by the SCM are digitized and processed inside the digital signal processor (DSP), within the Central Electronics Box (CEB), together with the electric field data provided by the spin-plane double probe (SDP) and the axial double probe (ADP). On-board calibration signal provided by DSP allows the verification of the SCM transfer function once per orbit. Magnetic waveforms and on-board spectra computed by DSP are available at different time resolution depending on the selected mode. The SCM design is described in details as well as the different steps of the ground and in-flight calibrations.     

在示波器校准中是否使用有源探头

测试工作的目标是把校准波形忠实地传送到被测示波器的输入端。多年来,人们已经开发了各种传送的方法来克服ＶＳＷＲ和其它的误差来源,其中一些方法较之其它方法更加实用,经济。概括介绍了一系列的实验并通过这些实验,我们对传统的的、比较复杂的使用脉部有源探头的方法和更加实用的同轴电缆的方法用示波器进行校准的情况做了比较。     

Wingtip generated wake vortices as radar target

Previous radar wake vortex detection experiments have resulted in measured beam averaged values of radar reflectivity from wake vortices in clear air. We have employed average wind and thermodynamic variable output from a two dimensional wake vortex model in clear air and fog to predict radar reflectivity in a wake vortex on a one meter grid. The results agree well, compared to data in the literature. In the clear air case, scales of turbulence were analyzed at each grid point to determine the appropriate maximum radar frequency for detection, initial wake structure, transport, and vortex persistence are related to atmospheric winds, atmospheric stability, and generating aircraft characteristics