The Effect of Spectral Shape on Clutter Standard Deviation

Many radar systems now employ wideband waveforms and noncoherent averaging techniques to reduce the scintillation of the backscatter from ground clutter. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effects of the wideband spectral shape on the clutter standard deviation after noncoherent averaging of the received signal. Relationships are developed which quantify the clutter standard deviation for any spectral shape and any ratio of transmitted band-width to processed bandwidth.     

A Modification to Improve the Inverse Filter of Senmoto and Childers

An inverse filter, contained in a recently published paper by Senmoto and Childers, is improved by the application of a shaping function derived by Turin in an earlier paper.     

Observations of 1–30 MeV gamma rays from the galactic center

Preliminary results are reported for gamma ray observations of the galactic center region made during a 15 hour balloon flight from Alice Springs, Australia on April 18, 1979. The observations were carried out with the UCR double-scatter gamma-ray telescope at energies of 1 to 30 MeV. The observations are compatible with a galactic source of approximately equal brightness along the region 300°<ℓII<60°. The energy distribution joins smoothly to previous spark chamber results at energies above 30 MeV and to scintillator results below 1 MeV. It appears to be a combination of nuclear gamma ray lines superimposed on a bremsstrahlung spectrum with a power law (1.3±.7) × 10⁻³ E⁻(^1.7±.2). The ¹²C* line at 4.4 MeV appears to be present with a significance of about 16σ. The flux in the line is (6±3) × 10⁻⁴photons cm⁻²s⁻¹rad⁻¹. The oxygen line at 6.1 MeV does not seem to appear significantly above background.     

Geysers spawn hot new nanotechnology

The article reports on efforts by NASA scientists to build nanostructures from thermophilic cyanobacteria living in hot springs. Heat shock protein 60 (HSP60) is purified and engineered to serve as a substrate for quantum dots that are about 1-10 nm across, much smaller than the typical 130 nm found in standard computer chips.     

The action of simulated and true weightlessness on the digestive tract of rats

Rats on board the Soviet Cosmos 936 satellite for 18$\text{1}\text{2}$ days showed a decreased glycoprotein secretion from the salivary mucous glands, stomach and intestine, and an increased leucine aminopeptidase and acid phosphatase content from the small intestine. Grimelius positive cells were activated. One group of rats were centrifuged at 1 g during the flight to simulate terrestrial gravity. Some investigations have suggested that under these conditions muscular and cardiac disorders diminished. In the digestive tract the benefits of centrifugation at 1 g are minimal and limited to a few glycoprotein components. The digestive changes are probably the expression of a stress response, unrelated to weightlessness. Similar changes, concomitant with a glycocorticoid hypersecretion, were found in rats after 15 days of hypokinesia on Earth. These digestive changes persisted even in adrenalectomized rats.     

Radar-assisted collision avoidance/guidance strategy for planarflight

We propose a radar-assisted collision avoidance/guidance strategy (RACAGS) for flight vehicles on low altitude missions. The task of obstacle avoidance and guidance are integrated in a single collision avoidance/guidance strategy. The avionic aids and computational requirements are modest as the strategy mainly depends on range-map and inertial system information. The strategy is first implemented in a planar scenario and then extended to three-dimensional and nominal trajectory following flight scenarios. Several simulation studies are presented for illustration     

A search for narrow band signals with SERENDIP II: a progress report

Commensal programs for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), carried out concurrently with conventional radio astronomical observing programs, can be an attractive and cost-effective means of exploring the large multidimensional search space intrinsic to this effort. Our automated commensal system, SERENDIP II, is a high resolution 131,072 channel spectrometer. It searches for 0.49 Hz signals in sequential 64,700 Hz bands of the IF signal from a radio telescope being used for an astronomical observation. Upon detection of a narrow band signal with power above a preset threshold, the frequency, power, time, and telescope direction are recorded for later study. The system has been tested at the Hat Creek Radio Astronomy Observatory 85 ft telescope and the NASA-JPL Deep Space Station (DSS 14) 64 m telescope. It is currently collecting data at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory 300 ft telescope.     

Viability of barley seeds after long-term exposure to outer side of international space station

Barley seeds were exposed to outer space for 13 months in a vented metal container without a climate control system to assess the risk of physiological and genetic mutation during long-term storage in space. The space-stored seeds (S0 generation), with an 82% germination rate in 50 seeds, lost about 20% of their weight after the exposure. The germinated seeds showed normal growth, heading, and ripening. The harvested seeds (S1 generation) also germinated and reproduced (S2 generation) as did the ground-stored seeds. The culm length, ear length, number of seed, grain weight, and fertility of the plants from the space-stored seeds were not significantly different from those of the ground-stored seeds in each of the S0 and S1 generation. Furthermore, the S1 and S2 space-stored seeds respectively showed similar β-glucan content to those of the ground-stored seeds. Amplified fragment length polymorphism analysis with 16 primer combinations showed no specific fragment that appears or disappears significantly in the DNA isolated from the barley grown from the space-stored seeds. Though these data are derived from nine S0 space-stored seeds in a single exposure experiment, the results demonstrate the preservation of barley seeds in outer space for 13 months without phenotypic or genotypic changes and with healthy and vigorous growth in space.     

Debris swarms seen by SMEI

The large 3° × 60° fields-of-view of the Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) instruments are oriented on the stabilized Coriolis satellite to image most of the sky each Sun-synchronous orbit. Besides observing coronal mass ejections, the SMEI mission objective, SMEI also has detected a plethora of Earth-orbiting satellites (resident space objects or RSOs) brighter than ∼8th magnitude at a rate of about 1 per minute. Occasionally, SMEI sees an RSO swarm: a sudden onset of a large number of RSOs, many more than the nominal rate, upto dozens detected in a 4-s frame. These swarms usually last for a few minutes. A sample of six such RSO ensembles is analyzed in this paper in which the distance and the direction of the velocity vector for individual objects are estimated. We present the observational evidence indicating that the swarms must be near-field objects traveling in orbits near that of Coriolis, and that the relatively speeds between the objects and Coriolis are low. Further, analyses indicate that the RSOs are quite close (<20 m) and are generally moving radially away from the satellite. The predicted encounter geometries for Coriolis passing through or near a small debris cloud is, generally, quite inconsistent with the observations. The most likely explanation consistent with the observations is that SMEI is seeing debris being ejected from the Coriolis spacecraft itself. An analysis of distance and brightness for a subset of the RSOs indicates that the median diameter of the debris particles is ∼80 μm.