Multi-Spectral Imager on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission

A multispectral imager has been developed for a rendezvous mission with the near-Earth asteroid, 433 Eros. The Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) on the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft uses a five-element refractive optical telescope, has a field of view of 2.93 × 2.25°, a focal length of 167.35 mm, and has a spatial resolution of 16.1 × 9.5 m at a range of 100 km. The spectral sensitivity of the instrument spans visible to near infrared wavelengths, and was designed to provide insight into the nature and fundamental properties of asteroids and comets. Seven narrow band spectral filters were chosen to provide multicolor imaging and to make comparative studies with previous observations of S asteroids and measurements of the characteristic absorption in Fe minerals near 1 µm. An eighth filter with a much wider spectral passband will be used for optical navigation and for imaging faint objects, down to visual magnitude of +10.5. The camera has a fixed 1 Hz frame rate and the signal intensities are digitized to 12 bits. The detector, a Thomson-CSF TH7866A Charge-Coupled Device, permits electronic shuttering which effectively varies the dynamic range over an additional three orders of magnitude. Communication with the NEAR spacecraft occurs via a MIL-STD-1553 bus interface, and a high speed serial interface permits rapid transmission of images to the spacecraft solid state recorder. Onboard image processing consists of a multi-tiered data compression scheme. The instrument was extensively tested and calibrated prior to launch; some inflight calibrations have already been completed. This paper presents a detailed overview of the Multi-Spectral Imager and its objectives, design, construction, testing and calibration.     

U.S. Army battery needs-present and future

The purpose of this paper is to describe the needs of the U.S. Army for silent portable power sources, both in the near and longer term future. As a means of doing this, the programs of the Power Sources Division of the Army Research Laboratory are discussed. In carrying out these programs, the personnel of the Power Sources Division work closely with the Battery Management Office of the Army Materiel Command, which is located in the Logistics and Readiness Directorate of the Communication-Electronics Command (CECOM). We are also closely integrated with the Army Research Office, and the fuel cell personnel of the CECOM Research Development and Engineering Center (RDEC), and the battery personnel of the RDECs for the Tank and Automotive Command and the Missile Command. The six program areas discussed in which the Power Sources Division is engaged are: primary batteries, rechargeable batteries, reserve/fuze batteries, pulse batteries and capacitors, fuel cells, and thermophotovoltaic power generation     

GPS Program Status

The Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS) Program is composed of three segments ? Space, Control, and User Equipment. The Space segment is responsible for the development and launch of the GPS satellite constellation. The Control segment is responsible for monitoring the satellite telemetry and providing updated navigation information to the satellites. The User Equipment (UE) segment is responsible for the development and procurement of the GPS receivers for a variety of host vehicle platforms. Recently, approval was given to the User segment to enter Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP). This approval marks the beginning of Phase III (production and deployment) of the GPS program. This paper will discuss the overall status of all three segments with an emphasis on the User Equipment segment as it enters the production phase of the program.     

Solar sail deployment dynamics

The deployment dynamics of a solar sail consisting of four flexible booms and four membrane quadrants are studied. First, previous work on modelling only one membrane quadrant attached to two axially moving beams using time-varying quasi-modal expansion is extended to be applicable to the complete four-quadrant system. This is achieved via “lifting” the quadrant-level matrices into system-level forms by mapping the former’s constituent blocks to the correct partitions in the latter. After the quadrant-to-system conversion of the matrices, the equations of motion from the authors’ previous work readily apply to the complete system. Modal analysis is performed on a constant-length sail to validate the model’s basic foundations against the results obtained by finite element methods in the past literature. Deployment simulation results are presented, numerical parameter studies that show possibility of instability are performed using the system’s eigenvalues, and the stability results are discussed.     

Modelling the effects of microgravity on the permeability of air interface respiratory epithelial cell layers

Although it has been suggested that microgravity might affect drug absorption in vivo, drug permeability across epithelial barriers has not yet been investigated in vitro during modelled microgravity. Therefore, a cell culture/diffusion chamber was designed specifically to accommodate epithelial cell layers in a 3D-clinostat and allow epithelial permeability to be measured under microgravity conditions in vitro with minimum alteration to established cell culture techniques. Human respiratory epithelial Calu-3 cell layers were used to model the airway epithelium. Cells grown at an air interface in the diffusion chamber from day 1 or day 5 after seeding on 24-well polyester Transwell cell culture inserts developed a similar transepithelial electrical resistance (TER) to cells cultured in conventional cell culture plates. Confluent Calu-3 layers exposed to modelled microgravity in the 3D-clinostat for up to 48 h maintained their high TER. The permeability of the paracellular marker ¹⁴C-mannitol was unaffected after a 24 h rotation of the cell layers in the 3D-clinostat, but was increased 2-fold after 48 h of modelled microgravity. It was demonstrated that the culture/diffusion chamber developed is suitable for culturing epithelial cell layers and, when subjected to rotation in the 3D-clinostat, will be a valuable in vitro system in which to study the influence of microgravity on epithelial permeability and drug transport.     

Influence of solar-geomagnetic disturbances on SABER measurements of 4.3 μm emission and the retrieval of kinetic temperature and carbon dioxide

Thermospheric infrared radiance at 4.3 μm is susceptible to the influence of solar-geomagnetic disturbances. Ionization processes followed by ion-neutral chemical reactions lead to vibrationally excited NO⁺ (i.e., NO⁺(v)) and subsequent 4.3 μm emission in the ionospheric E-region. Large enhancements of nighttime 4.3 μm emission were observed by the TIMED/SABER instrument during the April 2002 and October–November 2003 solar storms. Global measurements of infrared 4.3 μm emission provide an excellent proxy to observe the nighttime E-region response to auroral dosing and to conduct a detailed study of E-region ion-neutral chemistry and energy transfer mechanisms. Furthermore, we find that photoionization processes followed by ion-neutral reactions during quiescent, daytime conditions increase the NO⁺ concentration enough to introduce biases in the TIMED/SABER operational processing of kinetic temperature and CO₂ data, with the largest effect at summer solstice. In this paper, we discuss solar storm enhancements of 4.3 μm emission observed from SABER and assess the impact of NO⁺(v) 4.3 μm emission on quiescent, daytime retrievals of Tk/CO₂ from the SABER instrument.     

Measuring Black Hole Spin Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy

I review the current status of X-ray reflection (a.k.a. broad iron line) based black hole spin measurements. This is a powerful technique that allows us to measure robust black hole spins across the mass range, from the stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries to the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. After describing the basic assumptions of this approach, I lay out the detailed methodology focusing on “best practices” that have been found necessary to obtain robust results. Reflecting my own biases, this review is slanted towards a discussion of supermassive black hole (SMBH) spin in active galactic nuclei (AGN). Pulling together all of the available XMM-Newton and Suzaku results from the literature that satisfy objective quality control criteria, it is clear that a large fraction of SMBHs are rapidly-spinning, although there are tentative hints of a more slowly spinning population at high (M>5×10⁷ M _⊙) and low (M<2×10⁶ M _⊙) mass. I also engage in a brief review of the spins of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. In general, reflection-based and continuum-fitting based spin measures are in agreement, although there remain two objects (GRO J1655–40 and 4U 1543–475) for which that is not true. I end this review by discussing the exciting frontier of relativistic reverberation, particularly the discovery of broad iron line reverberation in XMM-Newton data for the Seyfert galaxies NGC 4151, NGC 7314 and MCG–5-23-16. As well as confirming the basic paradigm of relativistic disk reflection, this detection of reverberation demonstrates that future large-area X-ray observatories such as LOFT will make tremendous progress in studies of strong gravity using relativistic reverberation in AGN.     

Reducing variability in short term orbital lifetime prediction

Within the last year three major re-entries occurred. The satellites UARS, ROSAT and Phobos-Grunt entered Earth’s atmosphere with fragments reaching the surface. Due to a number of uncertainties in propagating an object’s trajectory the exact place and time of a satellite’s re-entry is hard to determine. Major influences when predicting the re-entry time are the changing precision of the available orbital data, the satellite’s ballistic coefficient, the activity of the sun which influences the Earth’s atmosphere and the underlying quality of the atmospheric model. In this paper a method is presented which can reduce the variability in short-term orbital lifetime prediction induced by fluctuating orbital data accuracies. A re-entry campaign is used as a reference for this purpose. For a window of a few weeks before the re-entry the position data of a synthetic object is disturbed considering different degrees of orbital data errors. As a result different predictions will exist for the generated position data of a given day. Using a regression algorithm on the available data an average position is obtained, which is then used for the orbital lifetime prediction. The effect of this measure is a more consistent prediction of the orbital lifetime. The paper concludes with the comparison of the generated re-entry windows in various test cases for the original and the averaged data.     

The O/OREOS mission: first science data from the Space Environment Survivability of Living Organisms (SESLO) payload

We report the first telemetered spaceflight science results from the orbiting Space Environment Survivability of Living Organisms (SESLO) experiment, executed by one of the two 10?cm cube-format payloads aboard the 5.5?kg Organism/Organic Exposure to Orbital Stresses (O/OREOS) free-flying nanosatellite. The O/OREOS spacecraft was launched successfully to a 72° inclination, 650?km Earth orbit on 19 November 2010. This satellite provides access to the radiation environment of space in relatively weak regions of Earth's protective magnetosphere as it passes close to the north and south magnetic poles; the total dose rate is about 15 times that in the orbit of the International Space Station. The SESLO experiment measures the long-term survival, germination, and growth responses, including metabolic activity, of Bacillus subtilis spores exposed to the microgravity, ionizing radiation, and heavy-ion bombardment of its high-inclination orbit. Six microwells containing wild-type (168) and six more containing radiation-sensitive mutant (WN1087) strains of dried B. subtilis spores were rehydrated with nutrient medium after 14 days in space to allow the spores to germinate and grow. Similarly, the same distribution of organisms in a different set of microwells was rehydrated with nutrient medium after 97 days in space. The nutrient medium included the redox dye Alamar blue, which changes color in response to cellular metabolic activity. Three-color transmitted intensity measurements of all microwells were telemetered to Earth within days of each of the 48?h growth experiments. We report here on the evaluation and interpretation of these spaceflight data in comparison to delayed-synchronous laboratory ground control experiments.