The management of stray radiation issues in space optical systems

The performance of infrared and submillimeter systems can be severely degraded by stray light. Stray light includes off-axis radiation, system diffraction and scattering effects, and thermal self-emission. The purpose of this paper is to identify several keys to preventing system degradation due to stray radiation. The first key is to apply stray light design rules and analysis techniques early in the program before the design is finalized. A systems level analysis using stray light analysis software is often necessary in order to identify more subtle problems and to assess the magnitude of their effect on system performance. Another key is to address contamination control and the choice of surface coatings early in the program. The management of stray radiation issues is extremely cost-effective, if begun early in the program, and can reduce later schedule hardships.     

The MESSENGER Spacecraft

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft was designed and constructed to withstand the harsh environments associated with achieving and operating in Mercury orbit. The system can be divided into eight subsystems: structures and mechanisms (e.g., the composite core structure, aluminum launch vehicle adapter, and deployables), propulsion (e.g., the state-of-the-art titanium fuel tanks, thruster modules, and associated plumbing), thermal (e.g., the ceramic-cloth sunshade, heaters, and radiators), power (e.g., solar arrays, battery, and controlling electronics), avionics (e.g., the processors, solid-state recorder, and data handling electronics), software (e.g., processor-supported code that performs commanding, data handling, and spacecraft control), guidance and control (e.g., attitude sensors including star cameras and Sun sensors integrated with controllers including reaction wheels), radio frequency telecommunications (e.g., the spacecraft antenna suites and supporting electronics), and payload (e.g., the science instruments and supporting processors). This system architecture went through an extensive (nearly four-year) development and testing effort that provided the team with confidence that all mission goals will be achieved. Larry E. Mosher passed away during the preparation of this paper.     

The low-energy neutral atom imager for IMAGE

The `Imager for Magnetosphere-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) will be launched early in the year 2000. It will be the first mission dedicated to imaging, with the capability to determine how the magnetosphere changes globally in response to solar storm effects in the solar wind, on time scales as short as a few minutes. The low energy neutral atom (LENA) imager uses a new atom-to-negative ion surface conversion technology to image the neutral atom flux and measure its composition (H and O) and energy distribution (10 to 750 eV). LENA uses electrostatic optics techniques for energy (per charge) discrimination and carbon foil time-of-flight techniques for mass discrimination. It has a 90°×° field-of-view in 12 pixels, each nominally 8°×°. Spacecraft spin provides a total field-of-view of 90°×360°, comprised of 12×45 pixels. LENA is designed to image fast neutral atom fluxes in its energy range, emitted by auroral ionospheres or the sun, or penetrating from the interstellar medium. It will thereby determine how superthermal plasma heating is distributed in space, how and why it varies on short time scales, and how this heating is driven by solar activity as reflected in solar wind conditions.     

Autonomous Navigation for the Deep Impact Mission Encounter with Comet Tempel 1

The engineering goal of the Deep Impact mission is to impact comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, with a 370 kg active Impactor spacecraft (s/c). The impact velocity will be just over 10 km/s and is expected to excavate a crater approximately 20 m deep and 100 m wide. The Impactor s/c will be delivered to the vicinity of Tempel 1 by the Flyby s/c, which is also the key observing platform for the event. Following Impactor release, the Flyby will change course to pass the nucleus at an altitude of 500 km and at the same time slow down in order to allow approximately 800 s of observation of the impact event, ejecta plume expansion, and crater formation. Deep Impact will use the autonomous optical navigation (AutoNav) software system to guide the Impactor s/c to intercept the nucleus of Tempel 1 at a location that is illuminated and viewable from the Flyby. The Flyby s/c uses identical software to determine its comet-relative trajectory and provide the attitude determination and control system (ADCS) with the relative position information necessary to point the High Resolution Imager (HRI) and Medium Resolution Imager (MRI) instruments at the impact site during the encounter. This paper describes the Impactor s/c autonomous targeting design and the Flyby s/c autonomous tracking design, including image processing and navigation (trajectory estimation and maneuver computation). We also discuss the analysis that led to the current design, the expected system performance as compared to the key mission requirements and the sensitivity to various s/c subsystems and Tempel 1 environmental factors.     

Inferring Nighttime Ionospheric Parameters with the Far Ultraviolet Imager Onboard the Ionospheric Connection Explorer

The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) Far Ultraviolet (FUV) imager, ICON FUV, will measure altitude profiles of OI 135.6 nm emissions to infer nighttime ionospheric parameters. Accurate estimation of the ionospheric state requires the development of a comprehensive radiative transfer model from first principles to quantify the effects of physical processes on the production and transport of the 135.6 nm photons in the ionosphere including the mutual neutralization contribution as well as the effect of resonant scattering by atomic oxygen and pure absorption by oxygen molecules. This forward model is then used in conjunction with a constrained optimization algorithm to invert the anticipated ICON FUV line-of-sight integrated measurements. In this paper, we describe the connection between ICON FUV measurements and the nighttime ionosphere, along with the approach to inverting the measured emission profiles to derive the associated O⁺ profiles from 150–450 km in the nighttime ionosphere that directly reflect the electron density in the F-region of the ionosphere.     

Research on compensation of motion,Earth curvature and tropospheric delay in GEOSAR

GEOSAR (synthetic aperture radar on geosynchronous satellite) becomes a potential method of space-borne geoscience remote sensing. Though it has attractive characters such as extra long observing time and very large observing area the unique geometry and relative motion are quite different from straight line required by SAR, and long integration time also causes delay by troposphere and ionosphere. Curvature of the Earth is no long negligible in GEOSAR. Especially, principle of azimuth compression in GEOSAR should be different from that of traditional SAR.In order to fulfill practical GEOSAR such problems should be solved. A new solution of azimuth compression together with motion compensation is presented here by taking the advantages of GEOSAR movement. A new method to overcome the Earth curvature in range compression of EACH footprint is testified. After compensating the Earth curvature traditional methods for range cell migration correction can be used in GEOSAR. Multi-sub-aperture method is applied to eliminate the phase delay caused by troposphere. This modified imaging algorithm makes it possible for GEOSAR to have long integration time and high resolution.     

Assessing the environmental impacts of aircraft noise and emissions

With the projected growth in demand for commercial aviation, many anticipate increased environmental impacts associated with noise, air quality, and climate change. Therefore, decision-makers and stakeholders are seeking policies, technologies, and operational procedures that balance environmental and economic interests. The main objective of this paper is to address shortcomings in current decision-making practices for aviation environmental policies. We review knowledge of the noise, air quality, and climate impacts of aviation, and demonstrate how including environmental impact assessment and quantifying uncertainties can enable a more comprehensive evaluation of aviation environmental policies. A comparison is presented between the cost-effectiveness analysis currently used for aviation environmental policy decision-making and an illustrative cost-benefit analysis. We focus on assessing a subset of the engine NO_X emissions certification stringency options considered at the eighth meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection. The FAA Aviation environmental Portfolio Management Tool (APMT) is employed to conduct the policy assessments. We show that different conclusions may be drawn about the same policy options depending on whether benefits and interdependencies are estimated in terms of health and welfare impacts versus changes in NO_X emissions inventories as is the typical practice. We also show that these conclusions are sensitive to a variety of modeling uncertainties. While our more comprehensive analysis makes the best policy option less clear, it represents a more accurate characterization of the scientific and economic uncertainties underlying impacts and the policy choices.     

Efficient multi-response adaptive sampling algorithm for construction of variable-fidelity aerodynamic tables

Adaptive sampling is an iterative process for the construction of a global approximation model. Most of engineering analysis tools computes multiple parameters in a single run. This research proposes a novel multi-response adaptive sampling algorithm for simultaneous construction of multiple surrogate models in a time-efficient and accurate manner. The new algorithm uses the Jackknife cross-validation variance and a minimum distance metric to construct a sampling criterion function. A weighted sum of the function is used to consider the characteristics of multiple surrogate models. The proposed algorithm demonstrates good performance on total 22 numerical problems in comparison with three existing adaptive sampling algorithms. The numerical problems include several two-dimensional and six-dimensional functions which are combined into singleresponse and multi-response systems. Application of the proposed algorithm for construction of aerodynamic tables for 2 D airfoil is demonstrated. Scaling-based variable-fidelity modeling is implemented to enhance the accuracy of surrogate modeling. The algorithm succeeds in constructing a system of three highly nonlinear aerodynamic response surfaces within a reasonable amount of time while preserving high accuracy of approximation.     

边界层内WENO格式特征重构精度的理论分析

WENO格式因其高精度以及良好的激波捕捉能力而被广泛地用于可压缩湍流的数值模拟过程中。为了在有强间断的流场中仍然能保证数值稳定，通常将流动物理量投影到特征空间后再进行WENO重构。然而这种特征重构方法在边界层内的精度问题仍需要进一步分析与研究。通过可压缩边界层自相似解构造平板边界层内法向的流动参数，并在该方向上进行WENO重构，得到求解半点数值通量的WENO非线性权重。通过分析实际得到的权重与理想权重的偏差大小发现在边界层流动中特征重构的精度明显低于分量重构。为了更深入地分析特征重构精度降低的原因，通过对曲线坐标系下的流动方程进行理论分析，推导得到特征重构时的特征变量形式。根据特征变量表达式以及自相似解中权重误差分布发现引起特征重构精度降低的主要原因是特征投影过程在半点处出现了额外的极值点，同时这种因特征投影过程而产生极值的特性将不会随着左右特征矩阵的不同选取而发生改变。进一步地，基于理论分析的普适性，对于任何光滑流场，只要使用特征重构的投影过程，都会在半点处产生极值从而使得WENO系列格式产生精度降低的现象。