英国国防战略大转变

根据英国国防部最近公布的国防部“防务战略评论”报告,英国决定采购两艘大型航空母舰,以及把空军和海军所有的垂直/短距起飞和着陆飞机组成一个联合部队,可能还会采购一定数量的美国“联合攻击战斗机”(JSF).     

加固的多通道多数据类型8毫米磁记录器

鉴于目前压缩预算和削减工程这种情况,遥测和其它数据采集采用低成本记录设备显得极其重要。政府和工业界都希望以小型、便宜的磁记录器取代大型、昂贵的多通道磁记录器。过去许多这类小型磁记录器由于其自身的结构问题,一直局限于记录单通道数据和某一特定的数据类型。 这种8毫米盒式磁记录器过去一直被看作是低成本记录设备,然而采用这种技术的产品在通道数量和数据类型方面受到了严格限制。为解决这一问题,美国马里兰州列克星敦帕克的维达(Veds)公司研制出了一种新的数据采集磁记录器,它采用飞行质量的小型加固机箱封装8毫米磁带机和模块化、可互换的数据输入通道。这些微处理器控制的输入通道能够接收PCM遥测数据、MIL-STD-1553、话音、IRIG时间和ARINC 429/629数据。这种新的结构可将多通道合并到单通道磁带介质上,并可由磁记录器直接重放某些数据类型。本文将讨论这种磁记录器的结构以及在研制中解决的设计问题。     

FIBERSIM(R)在无人机复合材料部件开发中的优点

FiberSIM能辅助无人机复合材料结构在更低的成本下取得更轻的重量,同时能标准化和自动化完成开发过程。高空无人机的机身约占起飞总重的三分之一。任何对机身的减重都直接转化成增加传感器或有效载荷、飞行持续时间。因此制造者专注于采用工业定义的工程过程来设计     

在温莎,有着被世界公认的最著名的学校——伊顿公学

英国温莎和上海完全是天壤之别的。温莎是一个传统的英式小镇,坐落在泰晤士河畔,离伦敦东部20英里,小卵石铺就的街道两旁坐落着小商店和餐馆,而上海是一个生机勃勃的现代化大都市,到处都是马路,商店和人。那么是什么使温莎变得特别呢?首先她是英国女王的主要住所温莎城堡的所在地,而且她有着被世界公认的最著名的学校——伊顿公学。     

The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap

The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap provides guidance for research and technology development across the NASA enterprises that encompass the space, Earth, and biological sciences. The ongoing development of astrobiology roadmaps embodies the contributions of diverse scientists and technologists from government, universities, and private institutions. The Roadmap addresses three basic questions: how does life begin and evolve, does life exist elsewhere in the universe, and what is the future of life on Earth and beyond? Seven Science Goals outline the following key domains of investigation: understanding the nature and distribution of habitable environments in the universe, exploring for habitable environments and life in our own Solar System, understanding the emergence of life, determining how early life on Earth interacted and evolved with its changing environment, understanding the evolutionary mechanisms and environmental limits of life, determining the principles that will shape life in the future, and recognizing signatures of life on other worlds and on early Earth. For each of these goals, Science Objectives outline more specific high priority efforts for the next three to five years. These eighteen objectives are being integrated with NASA strategic planning.     

The Urey instrument: an advanced in situ organic and oxidant detector for Mars exploration

The Urey organic and oxidant detector consists of a suite of instruments designed to search for several classes of organic molecules in the martian regolith and ascertain whether these compounds were produced by biotic or abiotic processes using chirality measurements. These experiments will also determine the chemical stability of organic molecules within the host regolith based on the presence and chemical reactivity of surface and atmospheric oxidants. Urey has been selected for the Pasteur payload on the European Space Agency's (ESA's) upcoming 2013 ExoMars rover mission. The diverse and effective capabilities of Urey make it an integral part of the payload and will help to achieve a large portion of the mission's primary scientific objective: "to search for signs of past and present life on Mars." This instrument is named in honor of Harold Urey for his seminal contributions to the fields of cosmochemistry and the origin of life.     

JIRAM, the image spectrometer in the near infrared on board the Juno mission to Jupiter

The Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) has been accepted by NASA for inclusion in the New Frontiers mission "Juno," which will launch in August 2011. JIRAM will explore the dynamics and the chemistry of Jupiter's auroral regions by high-contrast imaging and spectroscopy. It will also analyze jovian hot spots to determine their vertical structure and infer possible mechanisms for their formation. JIRAM will sound the jovian meteorological layer to map moist convection and determine water abundance and other constituents at depths that correspond to several bars pressure. JIRAM is equipped with a single telescope that accommodates both an infrared camera and a spectrometer to facilitate a large observational flexibility in obtaining simultaneous images in the L and M bands with the spectral radiance over the central zone of the images. Moreover, JIRAM will be able to perform spectral imaging of the planet in the 2.0-5.0 microm interval of wavelengths with a spectral resolution better than 10 nm. Instrument design, modes, and observation strategy will be optimized for operations onboard a spinning satellite in polar orbit around Jupiter. The JIRAM heritage comes from Italian-made, visual-infrared imaging spectrometers dedicated to planetary exploration, such as VIMS-V on Cassini, VIRTIS on Rosetta and Venus Express, and VIR-MS on the Dawn mission.     

Cyanobacterial emergence at 2.8 gya and greenhouse feedbacks

Apparent cyanobacterial emergence at about 2.8 Gya coincides with the negative excursion in the organic carbon isotope record, which is the first strong evidence for the presence of atmospheric methane. The existence of weathering feedbacks in the carbonate-silicate cycle suggests that atmospheric and oceanic CO2 concentrations would have been high prior to the presence of a methane greenhouse (and thus the ocean would have had high bicarbonate concentrations). With the onset of a methane greenhouse, carbon dioxide concentrations would decrease. Bicarbonate has been proposed as the preferred reductant that preceded water for oxygenic photosynthesis in a bacterial photosynthetic precursor to cyanobacteria; with the drop of carbon dioxide level, Archean cyanobacteria emerged using water as a reductant instead of bicarbonate (Dismukes et al., 2001). Our thermodynamic calculations, with regard to this scenario, give at least a tenfold drop in aqueous CO2 levels with the onset of a methane-dominated greenhouse, assuming surface temperatures of about 60 degrees C and a drop in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide from about 1 to 0.1 bars. The buildup of atmospheric methane could have been triggered by the boost in oceanic organic productivity that arose from the emergence of pre-cyanobacterial oxygenic phototrophy at about 2.8-3.0 Gya; high temperatures may have precluded an earlier emergence. A greenhouse transition timescale on the order of 50-100 million years is consistent with results from modeling the carbonate-silicate cycle. This is an alternative hypothesis to proposals of a tectonic driver for this apparent greenhouse transition.     

一种多级火箭飞行方案设计的工程方法

提出了一种进行单级和多级火箭飞行方案设计的一般方法。这是一种基于微积分变分原理的工程方法。其目的是根据给定导弹的攻角方案设计其俯仰角方案。最大攻角的优化根据给定的初始设计值采用正交法进行。该方法可以快速地进行多级火箭的飞行方案设计。