RBE: mechanisms inferred from cytogenetics.

Cyclotron-accelerated heavy ion beams provide a fine degree of control over the physical parameters of radiation. Cytogenetics affords a view into the irradiated cell at the resolution of chromosomes. Combined they form a powerful means to probe the mechanisms of RBE. Cytogenetic studies with high energy heavy ion beams reveal three LET-dependent trends for 1) level of initial damage, 2) distribution of damage among cells, and 3) lesion severity. The number of initial breaks per unit dose increases from a low-LET plateau to a peak at approximately 180 keV/micrometer and declines thereafter. Overdispersion of breaks is significant above approximately 100 keV/micrometer. Lesion severity, indicated by the level of chromosomal fragments that have not restituted even after long repair times, increases with LET. Similar studies with very low energy 238Pu alpha particles (120 keV/micrometer) reveal higher levels of initial breakage per unit dose, fewer residual fragments and a higher level of misrepair when compared to high energy heavy ions at the same LET. These observations would suggest that track structure is an important factor in genetic damage in addition to LET.     

Atmospheric dynamics and bioregenerative technologies in a soil-based ecological life support system: initial results from Biosphere 2.

Biosphere 2 is the first man-made, soil-based, bioregenerative life support system to be developed and tested. The utilization and amendment of local space resources, e.g. martian soil or lunar regolith, for agricultural and other purposes will be necessary if we are to minimize the requirement for Earth materials in the creation of long-term off-planet bases and habitations. Several of the roles soil plays in Biosphere 2 are 1) for air purification 2) as a key component in created wetland systems to recycle human and animal wastes and 3) as nutrient base for a sustainable agricultural cropping program. Initial results from the Biosphere 2 closure experiment are presented. These include the accelerated cycling rates due to small reservoir sizes, strong diurnal and seasonal fluxes in atmospheric CO2, an unexpected and continuing decline in atmospheric oxygen, overall maintenance of low levels of trace gases, recycling of waste waters through biological regeneration systems, and operation of an agriculture designed to provide diverse and nutritionally adequate diets for the crew members.     

Some practical strategies for reducing intermodulation in satellitecommunications

Various heuristic procedures for obtaining practical solutions to the general one-level carrier frequency assignment problem are described. The problem treated is general in the sense that it accommodates the case where L of the N slots may be explicitly designated as prohibited and unavailable for assignment. This problem occurs in satellite transmission with many small carriers accessing the same transponder where, due to multipath and TV interference from crosspolarized transponders of the same satellite and from copolarized transponders of the adjacent satellites, some portions of the bandwidth of the considered transponder cannot be used. To permit comparison with respect to the intermodulation advantage and central-processing-unit time required, the case without prohibited slots is considered. The sequential insertion procedure in which, starting with two carriers at the two end slots, one additional carrier at a time is optimally inserted into one of the unassigned slots is found best when the ratio between the available bandwidth and the total carrier bandwidth is greater than about 125%. All the heuristic procedures produced assignments whose intermodulation advantages are all greater than the bandwidth ratio     

MMW system trade-offs

A brief review is given of the current state of knowledge of millimeter-wave atmospheric propagation and clutter characteristics and the detection performance of two air-to-ground fire-control systems evaluated in terms of their ability to detect a 40-m² target in the presence of atmospheric attenuation and three types of clutter. Generally, the 35-GHz system considered performed better in terms of signal-to-noise ratio performance and in signal-to-clutter ratio performance for light clutter. In heavy clutter, the 95-GHz system performed significantly better than the 35-GHz system. For 300-m altitude with refrozen snow clutter background, neither system developed a large enough signal-to-clutter radio to detect the target reliably     

Observation of X-ray spectrum of GX301-2

X-ray source GX301-2 was observed with scintillation proportional counters in binary phase 0.90 to 0.05. Intense iron fluorescent emission and sharp iron K absorption edge appeared in all spectrum including flare, which occured on JD 2445814.6. The equivalent width are linearly correlated with column density and this can be interpreted by a simple model that cold isotropic gas surround compact source. Pulse fraction also changed inversely correlated way with column density which suggest smearing by scattering of x-rays in the reprocessing medium. Averaged iron K absorption edge energy was 7.36±0.02 keV.     

Influence of Microgravity on Self-Propagating High-Temperature Synthesis of Refractory Inorganic Compounds

The self-propagating high-temperature synthesis was applied for the production of foam materials under the conditions of microgravity aboard the Mirstation. The materials obtained have a porous bimodal structure. The results of space experiments predicted using the interpolation method are checked. An unpredicted phase separation of the combustion products is discovered. The autowave combustion of suspended nickel-clad aluminum solids is observed for the first time. The combustion products were found to have a frame structure.     

Blood and clonogenic hemopoietic cells of newts after the space flight.

Ribbed newts were used for studying the effect of space flight on board of the biosatellite (Cosmos-2229) on blood and clonogenic hemopoietic cells. In blood of newts of the flight group, the relative proportion of neutrophils increased, whereas that of lymphocytes and eosinophils decreased. Space flight did not result in loss of the ability of newt blood cells to incorporate H3-thymidine. Analysis of clonogenic hemopoietic cells was performed using the method of hemopoietic colony formation on cellulose acetate membranes implanted into the peritoneal cavity of irradiated newts. To analyze reconstitution of hemopoiesis after irradiation donor hemopoietic cells from flight or control newts were transplanted into irradiated newts whose hemopoietic organs were investigated. The newt can be considered an adequate model for studying hemopoiesis under the conditions of the space flight.     

Interaction of Phobos with the Solar Wind Plasma

The interaction of Phobos with the solar wind is considered both theoretically and using the experimental data of the FGMM magnetometer that were obtained in the course of the Phobos-2mission. It is demonstrated that the ions serving as a source of excitation of magnetosonic waves can be accumulated around Phobos. Examination of the magnetometer data has shown that the observed effects of a local decrease of the magnetic field near the Phobos orbit correspond to magnetosonic waves. Observation of these effects depends on the geometry of an experiment.     

A technique for enhanced slant range resolution for SAR systems inknowledge-based environment

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an airborne (or spaceborne) radar mapping technique for generating high resolution maps of surface target areas including terrain. High resolution is achieved by coherently combining the returns from a number of radar transmissions. The resolution of the images is determined by the parameters of the emissions, with more data giving greater resolution. A requirement of the Microwave Radar Division's SAR radar is to provide classification of targets. This paper presents a technique for enhancing slant range resolution in SAR images by dithering the carrier centre frequency of the transmitted signal. The procedure controls the radar waveforms so they will optimally perform the classification function, rather than provide an image of best quality. It is shown that a Knowledge-Based engineering approach to determining the waveform of the radar gives considerably improved performance as a classifier of targets (of large radar cross-section), even though the corresponding image is degraded