在服役中航空涡轮发动机的状态监控

本文是介绍涡轮发动机使用状态监控方面的一个新的综述.状态监控过程是使用各种不同的原理去跟踪发动机性能并找出机械故障模式的方法.本文也提出将监控资料转化为供航空公司使用的精确的维护建议需要的经验样本.     

The Radio Frequency Subsystem and Radio Science on the MESSENGER Mission

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) Radio Frequency (RF) Telecommunications Subsystem is used to send commands to the spacecraft, transmit information on the state of the spacecraft and science-related observations, and assist in navigating the spacecraft to and in orbit about Mercury by providing precise observations of the spacecraft’s Doppler velocity and range in the line of sight to Earth. The RF signal is transmitted and received at X-band frequencies (7.2 GHz uplink, 8.4 GHz downlink) by the NASA Deep Space Network. The tracking data from MESSENGER will contribute significantly to achieving the mission’s geophysics objectives. The RF subsystem, as the radio science instrument, will help determine Mercury’s gravitational field and, in conjunction with the Mercury Laser Altimeter instrument, help determine the topography of the planet. Further analysis of the data will improve the knowledge of the planet’s orbital ephemeris and rotation state. The rotational state determination includes refined measurements of the obliquity and forced physical libration, which are necessary to characterize Mercury’s core state.     

Tonic vibration reflexes and background force level

On Earth, the functional stretch reflex is an important component in the maintenance of posture and muscle tone. In parabolic flight experiments, we evaluated whether the functional stretch reflex, as reflected in the tonic vibration reflex, adjusts appropriately for changes in background gravitoinertial force level. Virtually immediate alterations of appropriate sign occurred.     

Extended Pile Driving Model to Predict the Penetration of the Insight/HP<Superscript>3</Superscript> Mole into the Martian Soil

The NASA InSight mission will provide an opportunity for soil investigations using the penetration data of the heat flow probe built by the German Aerospace Center DLR. The Heat flow and Physical Properties Probe (HP³) will penetrate 3 to 5 meter into the Martian subsurface to investigate the planetary heat flow. The measurement of the penetration rate during the insertion of the HP³ will be used to determine the physical properties of the soil at the landing site. For this purpose, numerical simulations of the penetration process were performed to get a better understanding of the soil properties influencing the penetration performance of HP³. A pile driving model has been developed considering all masses of the hammering mechanism of HP³. By cumulative application of individual stroke cycles it is now able to describe the penetration of the Mole into the Martian soil as a function of time, assuming that the soil parameters of the material through which it penetrates are known. We are using calibrated materials similar to those expected to be encountered by the InSight/HP³ Mole when it will be operated on the surface of Mars after the landing of the InSight spacecraft. We consider various possible scenarios, among them a more or less homogeneous material down to a depth of 3–5 m as well as a layered ground, consisting of layers with different soil parameters. Finally we describe some experimental tests performed with the latest prototype of the InSight Mole at DLR Bremen and compare the measured penetration performance in sand with our modeling results. Furthermore, results from a 3D DEM simulation are presented to get a better understanding of the soil response.     

TeV gamma-rays from proton blazars

Proton acceleration in nearby blazars can be diagnosed measuring their intense TeV -ray emission. Flux predictions for 1101+384 (Mrk421) and 1219+285 (ON231), both strong EGRET sources (0.1 – 10 GeV), are obtained from model spectra of unsaturated synchrotron pair cascades fitted to publicly available multifrequency data. An experimen tal effort to confirm the predicted emission in the range 1–10 TeV would be of great importance for the problems of the origin of cosmic rays, the era of galaxy formation and the cosmological distance scale.     

Effects of Low Energetic Neutral Atoms on Martian and Venusian Dayside Exospheric Temperature Estimations

The heating of the upper atmospheres and the formation of the ionospheres on Venus and Mars are mainly controlled by the solar X-ray and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation (λ = 0.1–102.7 nm and can be characterized by the 10.7 cm solar radio flux). Previous estimations of the average Martian dayside exospheric temperature inferred from topside plasma scale heights, UV airglow and Lyman-α dayglow observations of up to ∼500 K imply a stronger dependence on solar activity than that found on Venus by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter (PVO) and Magellan spacecraft. However, this dependence appears to be inconsistent with exospheric temperatures (<250 K) inferred from aerobraking maneuvers of recent spacecraft like Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey during different solar activity periods and at different orbital locations of the planet. In a similar way, early Lyman-α dayglow and UV airglow observations by Venera 4, Mariner 5 and 10, and Venera 9–12 at Venus also suggested much higher exospheric temperatures of up to 1000 K as compared with the average dayside exospheric temperature of about 270 K inferred from neutral gas mass spectrometry data obtained by PVO. In order to compare Venus and Mars, we estimated the dayside exobase temperature of Venus by using electron density profiles obtained from the PVO radio science experiment during the solar cycle and found the Venusian temperature to vary between 250–300 K, being in reasonable agreement with the exospheric temperatures inferred from Magellan aerobraking data and PVO mass spectrometer measurements. The same method has been applied to Mars by studying the solar cycle variation of the ionospheric peak plasma density observed by Mars Global Surveyor during both solar minimum and maximum conditions, yielding a temperature range between 190–220 K. This result clearly indicates that the average Martian dayside temperature at the exobase does not exceed a value of about 240 K during high solar activity conditions and that the response of the upper atmosphere temperature on Mars to solar activity near the ionization maximum is essentially the same as on Venus. The reason for this discrepancy between exospheric temperature determinations from topside plasma scale heights and electron distributions near the ionospheric maximum seems to lie in the fact that thermal and photochemical equilibrium applies only at altitudes below 170 km, whereas topside scale heights are derived for much higher altitudes where they are modified by transport processes and where local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) conditions are violated. Moreover, from simulating the energy density distribution of photochemically produced moderately energetic H, C and O atoms, as well as CO molecules, we argue that exospheric temperatures inferred from Lyman-α dayglow and UV airglow observations result in too high values, because these particles, as well as energetic neutral atoms, transformed from solar wind protons into hydrogen atoms via charge exchange, may contribute to the observed planetary hot neutral gas coronae. Because the low exospheric temperatures inferred from neutral gas mass spectrometer and aerobraking data, as well as from CO⁺ ₂ UV doublet emissions near 180–260 nm obtained from the Mars Express SPICAM UV spectrograph suggest rather low heating efficiencies, some hitherto unidentified additional IR-cooling mechanism in the thermospheres of both Venus and Mars is likely to exist. An erratum to this article can be found at     

ESA''s new intellectual property policy

This paper outlines the new intellectual property policy for ESA research and development contracts and how the new general contract provisions achieve a balance between the interests of the individual contractor, the member states and ESA's need to improve the competitive position of European industry as a whole.     

Feature enhancement and ATR performance using nonquadratic optimization-based SAR imaging

We present an evaluation of the impact of a recently proposed synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging technique on feature enhancement and automatic target recognition (ATR) performance. This image formation technique is based on nonquadratic optimization, and the images it produces appear to exhibit enhanced features. We quantify such feature enhancement through a number of criteria. The findings of our analysis indicate that the new feature-enhanced SAR image formation method provides images with higher resolution of scatterers, and better separability of different regions as compared with conventional SAR images. We also provide an ATR-based evaluation. We run recognition experiments using conventional and feature-enhanced SAR images of military targets, with three different classifiers. The first classifier is template based. The second classifier makes a decision through a likelihood test, based on Gaussian models for reflectivities. The third classifier is based on extracted locations of the dominant target scatterers. The experimental results demonstrate that the new feature-enhanced SAR imaging method can improve the recognition performance, especially in scenarios involving reduced data quality or quantity.     

相控阵雷达应用的进展

在过去十年，可以看到军用和民用相控阵雷达系统的快速发展。新的大项计划（欧洲也有）是这一领域的技术驱动因素。本文目的在于简述用相控阵雷达所能完成的挑战性雷达任务，地面、舰载、机载和星载系统的主要应用，关键的技术和未来的应用问题。     

Theory of the Gyrovibrator

After a short abstract of the theory for the gyroscope, the theory for the gyrovibrator,1 an angular rate-measuring device, is presented. It is shown that, in contrast to the theory given by Diamantides,1 the output signal and the natural frequency of the vibrating body depend on all three principal moments of inertia of the vibrating body.