A Quantitative Study of Pitfalls in the FFT

The effects of aliasing (including pseudoaliasing), picket-fence effect, and leakage in the fast Fourier transform (FFT) are presented. A computer program was written to perform the FFT analysis of known inputs. The program has the capability of detecting aliasing by calculating an "aliasing coefficient" (Q), and will increase the sampling frequency and the number of points in the input sequence if aliasing occurs. The term "pseudoaliasing" is a phenomenon which is similar to aliasing (or fold-over) but related to the effects of picket fence and leakage. The "leakage coefficient" (ri) is a quantitative measure of the deviation from the fundamental frequency component with respect to the sampling frequency, when the input sequence has only one frequency component.     

A direct fusion drive for rocket propulsion

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD), a compact, anuetronic fusion engine, will enable more challenging exploration missions in the solar system. The engine proposed here uses a deuterium–helium-3 reaction to produce fusion energy by employing a novel field-reversed configuration (FRC) for magnetic confinement. The FRC has a simple linear solenoid coil geometry yet generates higher plasma pressure, hence higher fusion power density, for a given magnetic field strength than other magnetic-confinement plasma devices. Waste heat generated from the plasma?s Bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation is recycled to maintain the fusion temperature. The charged reaction products, augmented by additional propellant, are exhausted through a magnetic nozzle. A 1 MW DFD is presented in the context of a mission to deploy the James Webb Space Telescope (6200 kg) from GPS orbit to a Sun–Earth L2 halo orbit in 37 days using just 353 kg of propellant and about half a kilogram of ³He. The engine is designed to produce 40 N of thrust with an exhaust velocity of 56.5 km/s and has a specific power of 0.18 kW/kg.     

An alternative to traditional software rehosting

This paper describes one alternative to rehosting TPS software to newer computer platforms. It describes the solution that Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) used to solve a problem with re-engineering legacy software into a modern object-oriented language. The advantages gained by this method are more advanced instruction to the operator (such as pictures and movies), flexible reporting scheme to diagnose system problems, and ease of software maintenance. This solution uses commercially available products including National Instruments/spl trade/ TestStand/spl trade/ and LabVIEW/spl trade/ and Microsoft/spl reg/ Visual Basic/spl reg/. The system is a four-tiered architecture to drive all test execution. The user interface is written in Visual Basic and allows the user to interact with the test execution when needed. This user interface in turn calls tests that are written in TestStand, and finally the individual tests call driver functions written in LabVIEW. A database serves as a repository for all test results, displays, and test limits. The use of this database allows for easy querying of measurement data to analyze trends in failures that help diagnose specific problems. By using this database, all test limits and test displays are contained in one central location that enables engineers to change these displays and limits on the fly without needing to change or even understand any test code. One other benefit of this data containment is that all Government classified data is separated out of the code and stored as one file, instead of in various locations as it was in the original source code.     

Observability, Eigenvalues, and Kalman Filtering

In higher order Kalman filtering applications the analyst often has very little insight into the nature of the observability of the system. For example, there are situations where the filter may be estimating certain linear combinations of state variables quite well, but this is not apparent from a glance at the error covariance matrix. It is shown here that the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the error covariance matrix, when properly normalized, can provide useful information about the observability of the system.