Optimised radiative cooling of infrared space telescopes and applications to possible missions

General principles are outlined for the design of space infrared telescopes intended to cool by radiation to the lowest temperatures attainable without the use of on-board cryogens, and assuming on-orbit cooling after a warm launch. Maximum protection from solar and earth heating, maximum radiating area and efficiency and minimum absorbing area and absorptivity are the obvious basic criteria. The optimised design is a short, fat telescope surrounded by a series of radiation shields, each cooled by its own radiator. Maximising the longitudinal conductivity of the radiation shields and of the telescope tube itself is important both to the on-orbit cooling time and the final achieveable temperature. Realistic designs take between 80 and 200 days to cool to within a few degrees of equilibrium temperatures, depending on the materials used. Great advantages accrue from the use of an orbit distant from earth. Both simple models and detailed simulations suggest that temperatures of 30 to 40 K are attainable in high earth orbits. Placing a radiatively cooled telescope in a halo orbit around the Lagrangian point L2 is a particularly attractive option and significantly lower temperatures can be achieved there than in Earth orbit. Optimised radiative cooling is an important element of the small Japanese mission SMIRT. We suggest that a combination of an ESA Medium-sized Mission with a NASA Explorer to send a 2m+ telescope to an L2 halo orbit would provide a cost-effective and powerful long-duration facility for the early 21st century.     

Galileo Net Flux Radiometer experiment

The Galileo Net Flux Radiometer (NFR) is a Probe instrument designed to measure the vertical profile of upward and net radiation fluxes in five spectral bands spanning the range from solar to far infrared wavelengths. These unique measurements within Jupiter's atmosphere, from which radiative heating and cooling profiles will be derived, will contribute to our understanding of Jovian atmospheric dynamics, to the detection of cloud layers and determination of their opacities, and to the estimation of water vapor abundance. The NFR uses an array of pyroelectric detectors and individual bandpass filters in a sealed detector package. The detector package and optics rotate as a unit to provide chopping between views of upward and downward radiation fluxes. This arrangement makes possible the measurement of small net fluxes in the presence of large ambient fluxes. A microprocessor-controlled electronics package handles instrument operation.     

Disturbance estimation and compensation in linear systems

Discrete-time estimation and compensation are discussed as a solution to the problems encountered when disturbances are present and degrade the performance of continuous automatic control systems. The method described, under a mild set of conditions, allows the designer to locate the closed-loop system poles substantially anywhere and provide disturbance rejection as large as desired by increasing the dimensions of the disturbance estimator. This estimation/compensation scheme results in a gain characteristic, below some frequency (ω_c ), with a slope of q×20 dB/decade. The value of q and ω_c can be chosen by the designer, within the physical limitations of the problem, so that the system error resulting from either deterministic or stochastic disturbances is sufficiently reduced. The method has been investigated for use with known linear, time-invariant systems     

Causal probabilistic model for evaluating future transoceanicairline separations

With the advent of automatic dependent surveillance (ADS), a detailed probability model of aircraft cross-track deviations is required to determine the impact of ADS. A suitable causal probability model is presented where normal navigation, degradation, pilot blunder, and failure are each modeled by Gaussian density functions with mean and standard deviations defined by the physics of the event. The overall model is a weighted sum of the Gaussian error probabilities and is thus amenable to extrapolation. Overlap and encroachment probabilities are derived,and the effect of ADS on this is model determined. It is shown that by using a simple form of ADS separation standards can be reduced, and transmitting a figure of merit (FOM) providing information on failures and degradations can further reduce separation standards. The results suggest an improvement by a factor of two from current separation standards     

Selected Problems in Collisionless-Shock Physics

The physics of collisionless shocks is a very broad topic, which has been well studied for many decades. However, there are a number of important issues which remain unresolved. Moreover, there have been new findings, which cast doubt on well-established ideas. The purpose of this review is to address a subset of unresolved problems in collisionless shock physics from a theoretical and/or numerical modeling point of view. The topics which are addressed are: the nonstationarity of the shock front, the heating and dynamics of electrons through the shock layer, particle diffusion in turbulent electric and magnetic fields, particle acceleration, and the interaction of pickup ions with collisionless shocks.     

Radar: The Cassini Titan Radar Mapper

The Cassini RADAR instrument is a multimode 13.8 GHz multiple-beam sensor that can operate as a synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imager, altimeter, scatterometer, and radiometer. The principal objective of the RADAR is to map the surface of Titan. This will be done in the imaging, scatterometer, and radiometer modes. The RADAR altimeter data will provide information on relative elevations in selected areas. Surfaces of the Saturn’s icy satellites will be explored utilizing the RADAR radiometer and scatterometer modes. Saturn’s atmosphere and rings will be probed in the radiometer mode only. The instrument is a joint development by JPL/NASA and ASI. The RADAR design features significant autonomy and data compression capabilities. It is expected that the instrument will detect surfaces with backscatter coefficient as low as −40 dB.RADAR Team LeaderThis revised version was published online in July 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

Development of three-phase switch-mode rectifier using single-phase modules

This paper presents a three-phase (3/spl phi/) switch-mode rectifier (SMR) consisting of three 1 /spl phi/ SMRs, two center-tapped autotransformers and three changeover switches. The ac input sides of three modules are /spl Delta/-connected, and their dc output sides are connected in parallel. As any one module fault occurs, the remaining two modules becomes modified T-connected and continuously perform three-phase rectification with good line drawn power quality. When two constituted 1/spl phi/ modules are faulted, the proposed 3/spl phi/ SMR will be operated as 1/spl phi/ SMR. The quantitative and robust voltage regulation controls for the developed SMR are made to consider the effects of changes of system parameters, operating condition, and number of connected modules.     

Visual analysis in a deployable antenna experiment [satellite antenna]

To establish a large deployable antenna, monitoring and collimation are essential for reliable and precise deployment. We have developed an analysis method to detect shifts in several images, in which the combination of cross-correlations between images and approximations at subpixel precision enables us to detect shifts in images with a precision of up to 0.01 pixels. The LDREX mission; which was a preliminary experiment for a large deployable antenna, ETS-VIII, was performed in December 2000. During this experiment, anomalies occurred in the antenna, and deployment was aborted. To understand the cause of the anomalies, we used our visual analysis method. Using this analysis, we detected vibrating features in the antenna, which were useful for explaining the anomalies. We outline our visual analysis method and discuss its application in monitoring the deployable antenna.