Mature systems for small satellite missions

Over the past several years Satellites International has developed an integrated suite of satellite sub-systems and small satellite buses. The sub-systems include S-band communications, attitude sensing and control, power conversion and distribution, and on-board data handling. They are inherently modular and readily adaptable to different satellite configurations, a concept known as semi-standardisation. This concept has been adopted by two generic low-cost buses: MicroSIL for satellites in the mass range 40–80kg; and MiniSIL for satellites in the range 100–500kg. Their architecture is based on the semi-standard sub-systems, but easily modified to utilise sub-systems from other manufacturers. They can support all stabilisation methods including spinning, 3-axis control and gravity gradient and are adaptable to a wide variety of missions including Earth resources, scientific, communications and technology demonstration. The Company also manufactures a range of low cost ground support equipment and complete ground stations to complement the space-borne systems.     

Biased PNG law for impact with angular constraint

A new homing guidance law is proposed to impact a target with a desired attitude angle. It is a variation of the conventional proportional navigation guidance (PNG) law which includes a supplementary time-varying bias. The proposed guidance law does not require a time-to-go estimation and has a simpler form. Analytic conditions for fulfilling the guidance goal are also provided. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed guidance law has wider launch envelopes than the previous one and shows a good performance even against a maneuvering target     

Terminal Guidance for Impact Attitude Angle Constrained Flight Trajectories

The design of a suboptimal terminal guidance system for reentry vehicles with a constraint on the body attitude angle at impact is studied. Permissible range of the miss distance and the body attitude angle at impact is specified. The problem is formulated as a linear quadratic control problem. The Riccati equation is derived to provide time-varying feedback gains. The desired scheme is suboptimal. The region of initial states for which the system meets the specifications becomes smaller as the initial height of the reentry vehicle at initial time is decreased.     

Deposition of aluminide and chromium-modified aluminide coatings on TiAl alloys using the halide-activated pack cementation method

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Enhancing the ATIC charge resolution

The Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) experiment is designed to investigate the charge composition and energy spectra of primary cosmic rays over the energy range from about 10¹¹ to 10¹⁴ eV during Long Duration Balloon (LDB) flights from McMurdo, Antarctica. Currently, analysis from the ATIC-1 test flight and ATIC-2 science flight is underway and preparation for a second science flight is in progress. Charge identification of the incident cosmic ray is accomplished, primarily, by a pixilated Silicon Matrix detector located at the very top of the instrument. While it has been shown that the Silicon Matrix detector provides good charge identification even in the presence of electromagnetic shower backscatter from the calorimeter, the detector only measures the charge once. In this paper, we examine use of the top scintillator hodoscope detector to provide a second measure of the cosmic ray charge and, thus, improve the ATIC charge identification.     

CREAM: 70 days of flight from 2 launches in Antarctica

The Cosmic-Ray Energetics And Mass balloon-borne experiment has been launched twice in Antarctica, first in December 2004 and again in December 2005. It circumnavigated the South Pole three times during the first flight, which set a flight duration record of 42 days. A cumulative duration of 70 days within 13 months was achieved when the second flight completed 28 days during two circumnavigations of the Pole on 13 January 2006. Both the science instrument and support systems functioned extremely well, and a total 117 GB of data including 67 million science events were collected during these two flights. Preliminary analysis indicates that the data extend well above 100 TeV and follow reasonable power laws. The payload recovered from the first flight has been refurbished for the third flight in 2007, whereas the payload from the second flight is being refurbished to be ready for the fourth flight in 2008. Each flight will extend the reach of precise cosmic-ray composition measurements to energies not previously possible.     

Temperature effects in the ATIC BGO calorimeter

The Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) Balloon Experiment had a successful test flight and a science flight in 2000–01 and 2002–03 and an unsuccessful launch in 2005–06 from McMurdo, Antarctica, returning 16 and 19 days of flight data. ATIC is designed to measure the spectra of cosmic rays (protons to iron). The instrument is composed of a Silicon matrix detector followed by a carbon target interleaved with scintillator tracking layers and a segmented BGO calorimeter composed of 320 individual crystals totaling 18 radiation lengths to determine the particle energy. BGO (Bismuth Germanate) is an inorganic scintillation crystal and its light output depends not only on the energy deposited by particles but also on the temperature of the crystal. The temperature of balloon instruments during flight is not constant due to sun angle variations as well as differences in albedo from the ground. The change in output for a given energy deposit in the crystals in response to temperature variations was determined.     

预混气不稳定性对螺旋爆轰结构的影响研究

为了明确预混气的不稳定性对螺旋爆轰内部结构的影响,在内径63.5mm的爆轰管道内进行了C_2H_2+2.5O_2+85%Ar,2H_2+O_2+50%Ar,C_2H_2+2.5O_2+70%Ar,C_2H_2+5N_2O和CH_4+2O_2的爆轰实验,得到壁面烟膜和端面烟熏玻璃记录的三波点轨迹。分析了预混气单头、双头、多头螺旋的差别及原因,发现预混气越不稳定,端面结构越难形成规则图形。稳定预混气向内部延伸模式较规律,不稳定预混气向内部延伸规律由于横波间相互干渉较难寻找。对多头胞格进行数字化处理,获得了壁面的三波点轨迹间距和端面的胞格尺寸数据以及方差。发现端面胞格的尺寸与壁面数据发展趋势一致,但是低于壁面数据,其中,C_2H_2+2.5O_2+85%Ar,2H_2+O_2+50%Ar,C_2H_2+2.5O_2+70%Ar和C_2H_2+5N_2O壁面横波间距分别由45.7,72.7,47.1和24.9减小为10.2,17.4,13.2和12.1,端面胞格由19.6,19.9,8.5和18.2减小为6.8,7.1,4.1和5.0。胞格离散度与轨迹间距离散度一致,但是胞格离散度更高,其原因在于壁面处的活化分子因为碰撞到壁面而减少。     

An LS-TLS-based sequential identification algorithm: Application toan accelerometer

Total least squares (TLS) parameter estimation is an alternative to least squares (LS) estimation when there are errors in both data matrix and observation vector. Especially, when some of the columns, not all, of the data matrix A are free of error, we call it a mixed LS-TLS problem. Accordingly, a sequential algorithm for solving a mixed LS-TLS problem is proposed here. The proposed algorithm employs an efficient algorithm to locate the minimum eigenpair, instead of singular value decomposition (SVD) which is computationally exacting. The proposed algorithm is applied to an accelerometer model to identify error parameters which are very important in inertial navigation systems (INS)