?AL Proyecto Azimut?La Industria Aeronáutica en el ámbito de la Comunidad Económica de América Latina ?AL Azimuth Project?Aeronautical Industry for the Latin-American Conmmon Market

The purpose of this paper is to promote the establishment of standards and basic requirements to direct development of preliminary orientational studies for the organic and financial structure, in the incipient period, of a Latin-American Aeronautical Industry, which is urgently needed to be incorporated into the integration plans of the Latin-American Common Market. Immediate action is recommended in view of statistical data analyzed for Mexican import and export values, for aircraft and its spare parts, that give $122 091 000 (U. S. currency) in the period from 1957 to 1964, with an average value of $6.55 per pound. Indices are also given for modern flight equipment in the range of $40 to $60 per pound, with a tendency to increase to the range of $80 to $90 per pound in the next five years.     

Fourth-order theories for orbit predictions for low- and high-eccentricity orbits in an oblate atmosphere with scale height dependent on altitude

Two new fourth-order non-singular analytical theories for the motion of near-Earth satellite orbits with air drag are developed for low- and high-eccentricity orbits in an oblate atmosphere with variation of density scale height with altitude. Uniformly regular Kustaanheimo–Stiefel (KS) canonical elements are utilized for low-eccentricity orbits and KS element equations are employed for high-eccentricity orbits. Only two of the nine equations are solved analytically to compute the state vector and change in energy at the end of each revolution, due to symmetry in the equations of motion. The analytical solutions are compared with the numerically integrated values up to 100 revolutions, and found to be quite accurate over a wide range of eccentricity, perigee height and inclination.     

Enabling leg-based guidance on top of waypoint-based autopilots for UAS

This paper presents a methodology to extend the guidance functionalities of Commercial Off-The-Shelf autopilots currently available for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Providing that most autopilots only support elemental waypoint-based guidance, this technique allows the aircraft to follow leg-based flight plans without needing to modify the internal control algorithms of the autopilot. It is discussed how to provide Direct to Fix, Track to Fix and Hold to Fix path terminators (along with Fly-Over and Fly-By waypoints) to basic autopilots able to natively execute only a limited set of legs. Preliminary results show the feasibility of the proposal with flight simulations that used a flexible and reconfigurable UAS architecture specifically designed to avoid dependencies with a single or particular autopilot solution.     

Experimental investigation of flow field in a laboratory-scale compressor

The inner flow environment of turbomachinery presents strong three-dimensional, rota-tional, and unsteady characteristics. Consequently, a deep understanding of these flow phenomena will be the prerequisite to establish a state-of-the-art design system of turbomachinery. Currently the development of more accurate turbulence models and CFD tools is in urgent need for a high-quality database for validation, especially the advanced CFD tools, such as large eddy simu-lation (LES). Under this circumstance, this paper presents a detailed experimental investigation on the 3D unsteady flow field inside a laboratory-scale isolated-rotor with multiple advanced measure-ment techniques, including traditional aerodynamic probes, hotwire probes, unsteady endwall static pressure measurement, and stereo particle image velocimetry (SPIV). The inlet boundary layer pro-file is measured with both hotwire probe and aerodynamic probe. The steady and unsteady flow fields at the outlet of the rotor are measured with a mini five-hole probe and a single-slanted hotwire probe. The instantaneous flow field in the rotor tip region inside the passage is captured with SPIV, and then a statistical analysis of the spatial distribution of the instantaneous tip leakage vortex/flow is performed to understand its dynamic characteristics. Besides these, the uncertainty analysis of each measurement technique is described. This database is quite sufficient to validate the advanced numerical simulation with LES. The identification process of the tip leakage vortex core in the instantaneous frames obtained from SPIV is performed deliberately. It is concluded that the ensemble-averaged flow field could not represent the tip leakage vortex strength and the trajectory trace. The development of the tip leakage vortex could be clearly cataloged into three phases according to their statistical spatial distribution. The streamwise velocity loss induced by the tipleakage flow increases until the splitting process is weak and the turbulent mixing phase is dominant.     

A new role for a new millennium? The changing nature of space activities

Space activity has lost the momentum it had in the past. During the Cold War the use of space was constrained by specific political and military conditions which gave it a strong but narrow identity. The aerospace industry, in particular, was in a position to develop protected and exclusive ties with the public sector. These times have passed and diminishing competition between the two main space powers has had consequences for the planning of major space undertakings. Space activity is in the process of being thoroughly transformed as it is forced to become more connected to general economic and industrial activity, especially in the field of information. An opportunity for a sector that has been struggling could also prove to be risky as space activity is losing some of its previously strong identity. Space currently seems to lack the high level of public support from governments it once enjoyed, while not finding an alternative in the industry itself to this declining investment. This situation should lead both the space community and the political authorities to consider new general space applications that will be more in line with the preoccupations of our modern societies and thus contribute to solving the principal global issues of tomorrow.     

Quality Assessment of the IDS Contribution to ITRF2008

Doppler Orbitography Radiopositionning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) is one of the four fundamental techniques contributing to the ITRF. The optimal coverage over the globe of the DORIS observing sites and sites co-located with GPS, allow a strong embedding of DORIS within the ITRF network. DORIS contributes to the access to ITRF through precise orbit determination of altimetric satellites with onboard DORIS receivers. The DORIS contribution to the ITRF2008 is enhanced by the fact that the solutions of seven analysis centers were included in the submitted combined time series of weekly station positions and daily polar motion. We evaluate the quality of the DORIS combined solution in terms of its agreement with the other techniques (VLBI, SLR, GPS) contributing to the ITRF2008 combination. We show in particular that the precisions of the current IDS products range between 1.5 to 2.6 mm for station positions (at the epochs of minimum variances); better than 1 mm/yr in velocities and between 170 and 260 micro-arc-seconds for polar motion, a significant improvement by a factor of three to five, compared to past data used in the ITRF2005 combination. This improvement is certainly due to improved analysis strategies employed by the seven IDS analysis centers that contributed to the combined weekly submitted solutions of station positions and polar motion. A spectral analysis of DORIS station height time series indicates that annual and semi-annual signals are dominant. However, TOPEX draconitic period of about 118 days is still detected in about 20% of the station position power spectra. DORIS height annual signals correlate well with GPS annual signal estimated at some co-located stations, which show that DORIS technique is able to detect loading signals.     

Validation of the operational IASI level 2 processor using AIRS and ECMWF data

The algorithms being implemented in EUMETSAT’s IASI Level 2 Product Processing Facility are validated with real case situations using AIRS data and comparing the retrieved atmospheric states with ECMWF analyses. The tests have been performed for clear-sky ocean scenes during daytime.

The Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) retrievals show very good performance, with retrieved atmospheric states standard deviations between 1 and 2 K in temperature and 10% and 20% in relative humidity when compared with ECMWF analysis in the troposphere. The EOF retrievals show relatively smooth profiles.

Results from an iterative retrieval show a standard deviation between 2 and 3 K in temperature and 10% and 30% in relative humidity when compared with ECMWF analyses in the troposphere. They tend to show meteorologically reasonable discontinuities in both temperature and relative humidity. This seems to be the reason why they do not compare as well with ECMWF analyses as the EOF retrievals do. Whether they are closer to reality or not will have to be tested with co-located radiosondes or similar more accurate data, which generally do not exhibit such smooth vertical profiles as ECMWF analyses do.     

The 2010 US space policy: A view from Europe

The authors examine the principles, goals and guidelines in the new US NSP. While in general favourable to the overall direction of the policy, noting that Europe too has similar goals or, in some cases, should be adopting US ideas, they are sceptical about certain aspects, such as the greater emphasis on commercial partnerships with NASA and the continuing protectionist launch policy. Particular points of concern are the vagueness and lack of clear goals in the human spaceflight programme and the US position on space weaponization at the Conference on Disarmament. Nevertheless, they believe that a similar type of EU-wide policy should be developed by the European Commission.