Substitution of satellite-based land surface temperature defective data using GSP method

Land surface temperature (LST) as an important environmental variable provides valuable information for earth environmental system modelling. Currently, LST is obtained through satellite thermal sensors at various spatial and temporal resolutions. Although spatially continuous satellite-based LST measurements are intended to overcome the shortcomings of sparse ground-based LST measurements, LST images often contain anomalous values due to the existence of clouds or sensor malfunctioning. The problem becomes more serious where the users deal with high spatial resolution characterized by low temporal resolution. This study examines the capability of a newly developed graph signal processing (GSP) method using two-dimensional single-date thermal data. For this purpose, four Landsat/TIRS datasets are analyzed. The data of five elliptical regions on thermal images are eliminated and then reconstructed through the GSP method and using the LST values of the enclosing rectangles containing the ellipsoids. The results indicate that the temperature variation determined by the GSP method generally conforms to the original image LST values. According to a correlation test conducted on the original image LST and those obtained through the GSP method, the values vary from 58% to 95%, which is an above-the-average rate (RMSE from 0.69 to 2.27). The statistical analysis of the original image LST in both the elliptical regions and the enclosing rectangles containing the ellipsoids indicates that an increase in the variance of LST data causes an increased error in the calculation of temperature by the GSP method, and vice versa. The results of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Duncan test indicated that an increase in the number of the non-zero spectral bins would result in increased RMSE values for all the dates and the regions. Moreover, the model errors were significant at the 0.05 level across all the image date and five elliptical study regions. Based on the results, the use of this method is recommended for the reconstruction of LST missing values, where dissimilarity of atmospheric conditions limits the use of other methods that depend on the time series data of various dates and a great deal of data calculation.     

Spacecraft formation flying control around L2 sun-earth libration point using on–off SDRE approach

In this paper, on–off SDRE control approach is presented for spacecraft formation flying control around sun-earth L2 libration point. Orbits around libration points are significant targets for many space missions mainly because of efficient fuel consumption. Furthermore, less propellant usage can be achieved by considering optimal control approaches in spacecraft formation flying control design. Among various nonlinear and optimal control methods, SDRE has shown to be a popular controller in various missions due to the privileges including efficiency, accuracy and robustness. The spacecraft are assumed to have on–off thrusters as actuators. It requires them to be fed with a sequence of on–off pulses which is regarded as a challenge for spacecraft designers. Hence, the main contribution of this paper is designing an on–off SDRE approach for the formation flight around sun-earth L2 point with uncertainty with energy and accuracy considerations. Including on–off input as a constraint is not feasible for SDRE implementation because it makes the system non-affine. An alternative is utilizing an integral action technique and an auxiliary control to make the system affine which leads to on–off SDRE approach. It has also been shown that the proposed method is robust against parametric uncertainties of the states. Present study aims to design an energy-beneficial, simple and attractive controller for a complex nonlinear system with on–off inputs and uncertainty in CRTBP. Simulation results show that the on–off SDRE control could provide the formation flight around L2 point with high accuracy using less energy consumption.     

A robust object-based shadow detection method for cloud-free high resolution satellite images over urban areas and water bodies

Unwanted contrast in high resolution satellite images such as shadow areas directly affects the result of further processing in urban remote sensing images. Detecting and finding the precise position of shadows is critical in different remote sensing processing chains such as change detection, image classification and digital elevation model generation from stereo images. The spectral similarity between shadow areas, water bodies, and some dark asphalt roads makes the development of robust shadow detection algorithms challenging. In addition, most of the existing methods work on pixel-level and neglect the contextual information contained in neighboring pixels. In this paper, a new object-based shadow detection framework is introduced. In the proposed method a pixel-level shadow mask is built by extending established thresholding methods with a new C₄ index which enables to solve the ambiguity of shadow and water bodies. Then the pixel-based results are further processed in an object-based majority analysis to detect the final shadow objects. Four different high resolution satellite images are used to validate this new approach. The result shows the superiority of the proposed method over some state-of-the-art shadow detection method with an average of 96% in F-measure.     

Developing an engineering-statistical model for estimating aerodynamic coeffcients of helicopter fuselage

The design of the geometric shape of a helicopter fuselage poses a serious challenge for designers. The most important parameter in determining the shape of the helicopter fuselage is its aerodynamic coefficients. These coefficients are determined using two methods:wind tunnel test and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. The first method is expensive, time-consuming and limited. In addition, estimates in regions away from data can be poor. The second method, due to the limitations of numerical solution, the number of nodes and the used solution, is often inaccurate. In this paper, with the aim of accelerating the design process and achieving results with reasonable engineering accuracy, an engineering-statistical model which is useful for estimating the aerodynamic coefficients was developed, which mitigated the drawbacks of these two methods. First, by combining CFD simulation and regression techniques, an engineering model was pre-sented for the estimation of aerodynamic coefficients. Then, by using the data from a wind tunnel test and implementation of statistical adjustment, the engineering model was modified and an engineering-statistical model was obtained. By spending less time and cost, the final model provided the aerodynamic coefficients of a helicopter fuselage at the desired angles of attack with reasonable accuracy. Finally, three numerical examples were provided to illustrate the application of the pro-posed model. Comparative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the engineering-statistical model in estimating the aerodynamic coefficients of a helicopter fuselage.     

Supersonic flow over a pitching delta wing using surface pressure measurements and numerical simulations

Experimental and numerical methods were applied to investigating high subsonic and supersonic flows over a 60° swept delta wing in fixed state and pitching oscillation.Static pressure coefficient distributions over the wing leeward surface and the hysteresis loops of pressure coefficient versus angle of attack at the sensor locations were obtained by wind tunnel tests.Similar results were obtained by numerical simulations which agreed well with the experiments.Flow structure around the wing was also demonstrated by the numerical simulation.Effects of Mach number and angle of attack on pressure distribution curves in static tests were investigated.Effects of various oscillation parameters including Mach number, mean angle of attack, pitching amplitude and frequency on hysteresis loops were investigated in dynamic tests and the associated physical mechanisms were discussed.Vortex breakdown phenomenon over the wing was identified at high angles of attack using the pressure coefficient curves and hysteresis loops, and its effects on the flow features were discussed.     

Modeling the ionospheric gradient by using VSS base functions and GPS data over Iran

The spatial and temporal variations of ionosphere play an important role in positioning and navigation by the space geodetic techniques. Therefore, the ionospheric gradient should be calculated, analyzed, and applied in both space and time. Spatial gradients of the ionosphere have remarkable delay on the propagation of electromagnetic waves. This study intends to propose a new method for simultaneous modeling of the spatial gradients of ionosphere and VTECs in the local scale for Iran. Vector Spherical Slepian (VSS) base functions are used for the development of this method.Five VSS models with the maximal degrees of L = 30, 35, 40, 45 and 50 are taken into account. For implementing the VSS method, 24 permanent GPS stations from the Iranian Permanent GPS Network (IPGN) have been used. The unknown coefficients are estimated with the observations of these stations with least squares technique. Four other stations are used for evaluating the accuracy of the models. Repeatability of baselines is the measure that is used for this purpose. Based on the results obtained, L = 40 is the optimum degree for the VSS model with this input data over Iran.The baselines’ repeatability showed that ionospheric gradients have more influence on the north–south component. Moreover, the spatial gradient is negligible in the east–west and up-down component when a short baseline is processed. In other words, this kind of ionospheric modeling has significant application for baseline, which is longer than 1000 km. In the study, proposed method has improved the long baselines' solution by more than 12%, 18% and 10% in east–west, north–south and up-down components, respectively.     

A heuristic design method for attitude stabilization of magnetic actuated satellites

In this paper a heuristic design strategy for stabilizing the satellite attitude has been proposed. It is assumed that the satellite is actuated by a set of mutually perpendicular magnetic coils. Using well-known Lyapunov direct stability method it is shown that the proposed controller causes to a global asymptotic stable system for all near polar orbits. The design procedure is based on analyzing of the conceptual effects of magnetic coils on the satellite attitude motion. Considering these effects lead to some intuitive results which determine the global stabilizing control law. The performance and robustness of the designed controller against actuators saturation and quantization error have been verified using a real-time-hardware–software in-loop (RTHSIL) simulation results. These results show that the global stability can be achieved although some disturbances and restrictions exist. This stabilizing controller can be simply combined with a linear explicit model predictive controller (EMPC) to achieve a full three-axis control law.