Pricing policy and legal issues: 6th and 7th EOPOLE workshops

The following report presents the main conclusions of the sixth and seventh EOPOLE workshops, held in Hydra, Greece, 3–4 May and Leiden, the Netherlands, 3–5 July 2000, respectively. The objectives of the first workshop were to evaluate different approaches to pricing policy and to assess how new developments in Earth observation and information technology are having an impact on Earth observation data pricing policy. Those of the second were to assess the constraints that legal frameworks impose on Earth observation and to explore ways in which they can be used to its advantage.     

Promoting the coalition for a lunar power system

Powering human civilization in the 21st century with clean energy from the Moon became the focus of a unique conference conducted at the Sea Lodge in LaJolla, California, 9–11 July 1990. Organized by Netrologic Inc of San Diego, the lunar-based Solar Power Planning Workshop attracted an elite group of 25 distinguished scientists, engineers and other professionals to formulate an international Coalition for a Lunar Power System. The participants ranged from Buzz Aldrin of Starcraft Enterprises and Bryan Erb of the Canadian Space Agency, to Osamu Inoue of Shimizu Corporation and Gary McAllister of Bechtel Corporation.     

The US civilian space programme : Charting a new course

The US space programme continues to face difficulties in restructuring to meet existing political and fiscal conditions, in part because the basic structure and focus of the programme derive from the tensions of the Cold War. This paper argues that the world's new, more complicated political and economic conditions present a challenge for US policy makers that can be met with a renewed focus on the pursuit of science and the public good, within the context of international economic competition and political and scientific cooperation.     

The OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft and the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM)

The Origins, Spectral-Interpretation, Resource-Identification, Security and Regolith-Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft supports all aspects of the mission science objectives, from extensive remote sensing at the asteroid Bennu, to sample collection and return to Earth. In general, the success of planetary missions requires the collection, return, and analysis of data, which in turn depends on the successful operation of instruments and the host spacecraft. In the case of OSIRIS-REx, a sample-return mission, the spacecraft must also support the acquisition, safe stowage, and return of the sample. The target asteroid is Bennu, a B-class near-Earth asteroid roughly 500 m diameter. The Lockheed Martin-designed and developed OSIRIS-REx spacecraft draws significant heritage from previous missions and features the Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism, or TAGSAM, to collect sample from the surface of Bennu. Lockheed Martin developed TAGSAM as a novel, simple way to collect samples on planetary bodies. During short contact with the asteroid surface, TAGSAM releases curation-grade nitrogen gas, mobilizing the surface regolith into a collection chamber. The contact surface of TAGSAM includes “contact pads”, which are present to collect surface grains that have been subject to space weathering. Extensive 1-g laboratory testing, “reduced-gravity” testing (via parabolic flights on an airplane), and analysis demonstrate that TAGSAM will collect asteroid material in nominal conditions, and a variety of off-nominal conditions, such as the presence of large obstacles under the TAGSAM sampling head, or failure in the sampling gas firing. TAGSAM, and the spacecraft support of the instruments, are central to the success of the mission.     

Impact of loading effects on determination of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame

The International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF), as a realization of the International Terrestrial Reference System (ITRS), is represented by a set of station positions and linear velocities. They are intended to be used as regularized coordinates to which some corrections should be added to access instantaneous coordinates. The latest ITRS realization is the ITRF2005, which has integrated time series of station positions to form long-term solutions for the four space geodetic techniques. Currently, a purely linear model is used to parameterize station displacements in the estimation process, plus occasional discontinuities in case of earthquakes or equipment changes. However the input data have been derived without applying surface loading models and so surface loading effects are supposed to be embedded in the coordinates as measured quantities. We evaluate the effect of applying a posteriori loading corrections, which include the effect of atmospheric, non-tidal ocean, and continental water loading, to time series of positions estimated from Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), and Global Positioning System (GPS) data. We notice that they reduce about 50% or more of the annual signals in the translation and scale parameter time series of the SLR and VLBI techniques, except in SLR Z translation. In general, the estimated secular frame definition is negligibly affected and estimated positions and velocities are not significantly modified for stations that have accumulated a large number of observations. A multi-technique combination of such derived frames allows concluding that, for some cases, loading model corrections might degrade co-located station coordinates almost as much as they benefit them. However, most significant improvement of the estimated secular coordinates is observed for stations with less than 100 estimated positions as demonstrated with a multi-technique combination.     

Measuring Techniques Applied in an MHD-Augmented Shock Tunnel

The determination of the detailed performance of an MHD-augmented high-enthalphy shock tunnel requires the simultaneous measurment of a large number of aerodynamic, electrical, and electromagnetic parameters in a test time interval of the order of several hundred microseconds. In the feasibility study currently being conducted in our laboratory of such a device, an extensive measuring system was set up and evaluated, and is being used to acquire facility performance data. This paper describes this measuring system, discusses the modifications and adaptations applied to make the various components of the system operable and compatible, and gives illustrative examples of the performance of the system.     

Thermospheric gravity waves: Observations and interpretation using the transfer function model (TFM)

Gravity waves are prominent in the polar region of the terrestiral thermosphere, and can be excited by perturbations in Joule heating and Lorents force due to magnetospheric processes. We show observations from the Dynamics Explorer-2 satellite to illustrate the complexity of the phenomenon and review the transfer function model (TFM) which has guided our interpretation. On a statistical basis, the observed atmospheric perturbations decrease from the poles toward the equator and tend to correlate with the magnetic activity index, Ap, although individual measurements indicate that the magnetic index is often a poor measure of gravity wave excitation. The theoretical models devised to describe gravity waves are multifaceted. On one end are fully analytical, linear models which are based on the work of Hines. On the other end are fully numerical, thermospheric general circulation models (TGCMs) which incorporate non-linear processes and wave mean flow interactions. The transfer function model (TFM) discussed in this paper is between these two approaches. It is less restrictive than the analytical approach and relates the global propagation of gravity waves to their excitation. Compared with TGCMs, the TFM is simplified by its linear approximation; but it is not limited in spatial and temporal resolution, and the TFM describes the wave propagation through the lower atmosphere. Moreover, the TFM is semianalytical which helps in delineating the wave components. Using expansions in terms of spherical harmonics and Fourier components, the transfer function is obtained from numerical height integration. This is time consuming computationally but needs to be done only once. Once such a transfer function is computed, the wave response to arbitrary source distributions on the globe can then be constructed in very short order. In this review, we discuss some numerical experiments performed with the TFM, to study the various wave components excited in the auroral regions which propagate through the thermosphere and lower atmosphere, and to elucidate the properties of realistic source geometries. The model is applied to the interpretation of satellite measurements. Gravity waves observed in the thermosphere of Venus are also discussed.