The Genesis Solar-Wind Collector Materials

Genesis (NASA Discovery Mission #5) is a sample return mission. Collectors comprised of ultra-high purity materials will be exposed to the solar wind and then returned to Earth for laboratory analysis. There is a suite of fifteen types of ultra-pure materials distributed among several locations. Most of the materials are mounted on deployable panels (‘collector arrays’), with some as targets in the focal spot of an electrostatic mirror (the ‘concentrator’). Other materials are strategically placed on the spacecraft as additional targets of opportunity to maximize the area for solar-wind collection. Most of the collection area consists of hexagonal collectors in the arrays; approximately half are silicon, the rest are for solar-wind components not retained and/or not easily measured in silicon. There are a variety of materials both in collector arrays and elsewhere targeted for the analyses of specific solar-wind components. Engineering and science factors drove the selection process. Engineering required testing of physical properties such as the ability to withstand shaking on launch and thermal cycling during deployment. Science constraints included bulk purity, surface and interface cleanliness, retentiveness with respect to individual solar-wind components, and availability. A detailed report of material parameters planned as a resource for choosing materials for study will be published on a Genesis website, and will be updated as additional information is obtained. Some material is already linked to the Genesis plasma data website (genesis.lanl.gov). Genesis should provide a reservoir of materials for allocation to the scientific community throughout the 21st Century. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Summary of quantitative interpretation of IMAGE far ultraviolet auroral data

Direct imaging of the magnetosphere by instruments on the IMAGE spacecraft is supplemented by simultaneous observations of the global aurora in three far ultraviolet (FUV) wavelength bands. The purpose of the multi-wavelength imaging is to study the global auroral particle and energy input from the magnetosphere into the atmosphere. This paper describes the method for quantitative interpretation of FUV measurements. The Wide-Band Imaging Camera (WIC) provides broad band ultraviolet images of the aurora with maximum spatial resolution by imaging the nitrogen lines and bands between 140 and 180 nm wavelength. The Spectrographic Imager (SI), a dual wavelength monochromatic instrument, images both Doppler-shifted Lyman-α emissions produced by precipitating protons, in the SI-12 channel and OI 135.6 nm emissions in the SI-13 channel. From the SI-12 Doppler shifted Lyman-α images it is possible to obtain the precipitating proton flux provided assumptions are made regarding the mean energy of the protons. Knowledge of the proton (flux and energy) component allows the calculation of the contribution produced by protons in the WIC and SI-13 instruments. Comparison of the corrected WIC and SI-13 signals provides a measure of the electron mean energy, which can then be used to determine the electron energy flux. To accomplish this, reliable emission modeling and instrument calibrations are required. In-flight calibration using early-type stars was used to validate the pre-flight laboratory calibrations and determine long-term trends in sensitivity. In general, very reasonable agreement is found between in-situ measurements and remote quantitative determinations.     

Heliosphere-Geosphere Interactions Using Low Energy Neutral Atom Imaging

Development of the low energy neutral atom (LENA) imager was originally motivated by a need to remotely sense plasma heating in the topside ionosphere, with the goal of greatly enhanced temporal resolution of an otherwise familiar phenomenon. During ground test and calibration, the LENA imager was found to respond to neutral atoms with energies well above its nominal energy range of 10–750 eV, up to at least 3–4 keV, owing to sputtering interactions with its conversion surface. On orbit, LENA has been found to respond to a ubiquitous neutral atom component of the solar wind, to the neutral atoms formed by magnetosheath interactions with the geocorona during periods of high solar wind pressure, and to the interstellar neutral atoms flowing through the heliosphere during the season of maximal relative wind velocity between spacecraft and interstellar medium. LENA imaging has thus emerged as a promising new tool for studying the interplanetary medium and its interaction with the magnetosphere, in addition to the ionospheric heating and outflow that result from this interaction. LENA emissions from the ionosphere consist of a fast component that can be observed at high altitudes, and slower components that evidently create a quasi-trapped extended superthermal exosphere. The more energetic emissions are responsive to solar wind energy inputs on time scales of a few minutes.     

Huygens Probe Aerosol Collector Pyrolyser Experiment

ACP's main objective is the chemical analysis of the aerosols in Titan's atmosphere. For this purpose, it will sample the aerosols during descent and prepare the collected matter (by evaporation, pyrolysis and gas products transfer) for analysis by the Huygens Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS). A sampling system is required for sampling the aerosols in the 135'32 km and 22'17 km altitude regions of Titan's atmosphere. A pump unit is used to force the gas flow through a filter. In its sampling position, the filter front face extends a few mm beyond the inlet tube. The oven is a pyrolysis furnace where a heating element can heat the filter and hence the sampled aerosols to 250 °C or 600 °C. The oven contains the filter, which has a thimble-like shape (height 28 mm). For transferring effluent gas and pyrolysis products to GCMS, the carrier gas is a labeled nitrogen ¹⁵N₂, to avoid unwanted secondary reactions with Titan's atmospheric nitrogen. Aeraulic tests under cold temperature conditions were conducted by using a cold gas test system developed by ONERA. The objective of the test was to demonstrate the functional ability of the instrument during the descent of the probe and to understand its thermal behavior, that is to test the performance of all its components, pump unit and mechanisms. In order to validate ACP's scientific performance, pyrolysis tests were conducted at LISA on solid phase material synthesized from experimental simulation. The chromatogram obtained by GCMS analysis shows many organic compounds. Some GC peaks appear clearly from the total mass spectra, with specific ions well identified thanks to the very high sensitivity of the mass spectrometer. The program selected for calibrating the flight model is directly linked to the GCMS calibration plan. In order not to pollute the two flight models with products of solid samples such as tholins, we excluded any direct pyrolysis tests through the ACP oven during the first phase of the calibration. Post probe descent simulation of flight results are planned, using the much representative GCMS and ACP spare models. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

单晶铝纳米级硬度试验研究

使用纳米硬度计对单晶铝进行了纳米压痕试验，利用原子力显微镜对压痕形貌进行扫描并计算硬度值，重点观察和分析了纳米级条件下单晶铝的硬度性质，结果表明，当压痕深度小于2000nm时，单晶铝纳米硬度存在尺寸效应现象；从材料性质的角度分析了纳米硬度尺寸效应现象；探讨了纳米硬度和传统硬度本质上的区别，指出其根本原因在于不同尺度下人们对材料性质的关注点不同。     

Comet Geology with Deep Impact Remote Sensing

The Deep Impact mission will provide the highest resolution images yet of a comet nucleus. Our knowledge of the makeup and structure of cometary nuclei, and the processes shaping their surfaces, is extremely limited, thus use of the Deep Impact data to show the geological context of the cratering experiment is crucial. This article briefly discusses some of the geological issues of cometary nuclei.     

Track-before-detect procedures for early detection of moving target from airborne radars

In this paper we present a family of track-before-detect (TBD) procedures for early detection of moving targets from airborne radars. Upon a sectorization of the coverage area, the received echoes are jointly processed in the azimuth-range-Doppler domain and in the time domain through a Viterbi-like algorithm that exploits the physically admissible target transitions between successive illuminations, in order to collect all of the energy back-scattered during the time on target (TOT). A reduced-complexity implementation is derived assuming, at the design stage, that the target does not change resolution cell during the TOT in each scan. The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) constraint is also englobed in the proposed procedures as well as the possibility of working with quantized data. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms have good detection and tracking capabilities even for high target velocities and low quantization rates.     

Far ultraviolet imaging from the IMAGE spacecraft. 3. Spectral imaging of Lyman-α and OI 135.6 nm

Two FUV Spectral imaging instruments, the Spectrographic Imager (SI) and the Geocorona Photometer (GEO) provide IMAGE with simultaneous global maps of the hydrogen (121.8 nm) and oxygen 135.6 nm components of the terrestrial aurora and with observations of the three dimensional distribution of neutral hydrogen in the magnetosphere (121.6 nm). The SI is a novel instrument type, in which spectral separation and imaging functions are independent of each other. In this instrument, two-dimensional images are produced on two detectors, and the images are spectrally filtered by a spectrograph part of the instrument. One of the two detectors images the Doppler-shifted Lyman- while rejecting the geocoronal `cold Ly-, and another detector images the OI 135.6 nm emission. The spectrograph is an all-reflective Wadsworth configuration in which a grill arrangement is used to block most of the cold, un-Doppler-shifted geocoronal emission at 121.567 nm. The SI calibration established that the upper limit of transmission at cold geocoronal Ly- is less than 2%. The measured light collecting efficiency was 0.01 and 0.008 cm² at 121.8 and at 135.6 nm, respectively. This is consistent with the size of the input aperture, the optical transmission, and the photocathode efficiency. The expected sensitivity is 1.8×10^–2 and 1.3×10^–2 counts per Rayleigh per pixel for each 5 s viewing exposure per satellite revolution (120 s). The measured spatial resolution is better than the 128×128 pixel matrix over the 15°×15° field of view in both wavelength channels. The SI detectors are photon counting devices using the cross delay line principle. In each detector a triple stack microchannel plate (MCP) amplifies the photo-electronic charge which is then deposited on a specially configured anode array. The position of the photon event is measured by digitizing the time delay between the pulses detected at each end of the anode structures. This scheme is intrinsically faster than systems that use charge division and it has a further advantage that it saturates more gradually at high count rates. The geocoronal Ly- is measured by a three-channel photometer system (GEO) which is a separate instrument. Each photometer has a built in MgF₂ lens to restrict the field of view to one degree and a ceramic electron multiplier with a KBr photocathode. One of the tubes is pointing radially outward perpendicular to the axis of satellite rotation. The optic of the other two subtend 60° with the rotation axis. These instruments take data continuously at 3 samples per second and rely on the combination of satellite rotation and orbital motion to scan the hydrogen cloud surrounding the earth. The detective efficiencies (effective quantum efficiency including windows) of the three tubes at Ly- are between 6 and 10%.     

Frequency estimation techniques for high dynamic trajectories

A comparison is presented of four different estimation techniques applied to the problem of continuously estimating the rapidly varying parameters of a sinusoidal signal, observed in the presence of additive noise. Frequency estimates are emphasized, although phase and/or frequency rate are also estimated by some of the algorithms. These parameters are related to the velocity, position, and acceleration of the maneuvering receiver or transmitter. Estimated performance at low carrier-to-noise ratios and high dynamics is investigated for the purpose of determining the useful operating range of an approximate maximum likelihood estimator, an extended Kalman filter, a cross-product automatic frequency loop and a phase-locked loop. Numerical simulations are used to evaluate performance while tracking a common trajectory exhibiting high dynamics     

Ion Acoustic Waves in the Heliosphere

Observations of ion acoustic waves in the solar wind during the first and second orbit of the Ulysses spacecraft are presented. The observations show variations of the wave activity with the heliolatitude and with the phase of the solar cycle. The interrelationships between the wave intensity and the electron heat flux and the ratio of electron to proton temperature, T _e/T _p, are examined. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.