Clicks,whistles and pulses: Passive and active signal use in dolphin communication

The search for signals out of noise is a problem not only with radio signals from the sky but in the study of animal communication. Dolphins use multiple modalities to communicate including body postures, touch, vision, and most elaborately sound. Like SETI radio signal searches, dolphin sound analysis includes the detection, recognition, analysis, and interpretation of signals. Dolphins use both passive listening and active production to communicate. Dolphins use three main types of acoustic signals: frequency modulated whistles (narrowband with harmonics), echolocation (broadband clicks) and burst pulsed sounds (packets of closely spaced broadband clicks). Dolphin sound analysis has focused on frequency-modulated whistles, yet the most commonly used signals are burst-pulsed sounds which, due to their graded and overlapping nature and bimodal inter-click interval (ICI) rates are hard to categorize. We will look at: 1) the mechanism of sound production and categories of sound types, 2) sound analysis techniques and information content, and 3) examples of lessons learned in the study of dolphin acoustics. The goal of this paper is to provide perspective on how animal communication studies might provide insight to both passive and active SETI in the larger context of searching for life signatures.     

German SIMBOX on Chinese mission Shenzhou-8: Europe's first bilateral cooperation utilizing China's Shenzhou programme

On November 1, 2011, at 05:58 local time, the Chinese spaceship Shenzhou-8 was launched for a 17-day mission with a Long March rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Mongolia desert. On board was the German SIMBOX (Science in Microgravity Box) experimental facility containing 17 bio-medical experiments, which were conducted by German researchers together with their Chinese colleagues. It was the first time that China cooperated with a European nation in the scientific utilization of Shenzhou – the core element of China's human spaceflight programme.     

基于全球网和区域网SLR数据的低轨卫星定轨精度分析

卫星激光测距(SLR)是目前低轨卫星常用的定轨手段之一.文章以贾森-1(Jason-1)和"环境卫星"(EN VISAT)实测数据为例,讨论了不同弧段长度(1天、3天和7天)的全球网SLR数据对低轨卫星定轨精度的影响,分析了基于美国网、欧洲网和亚洲网等区域网SLR数据的低轨卫星精密定轨精度.检验定轨精度的参考轨道来自美...     

邻近空间无线通信连接技术的探讨

文章研究了CCSDSPSLP（空间数据系统咨询委员会邻近空间链路协议）的连接技术,从连接帧格式、指令内容、状态逻辑、参数配置等方面进行了深入分析,重点研究了物理层、编码与同步子层的底层功能及接口细节,并从实现的角度讨论了三种优化连接的方法流程,为基于PSLP的设备研制做出了具备应用价值的技术探索.     

浅论无人机机载卫通天线尺寸与数字信号传输带宽关系

卫星通信是无人机中继通信的重要手段。本文对无人机卫星通信链路中飞机总体设计关注的机载卫通天线尺寸选择问题进行了较详细的计算、探讨。     

2012–2014 China's Earth Observation and Earth Science Development

Human beings are now facing global and regional sustainable development challenges.In China, Earth observation data play a fundamental role in Earth system science research. The support given by Earth observation data is required by many studies, including those on Earth's limited natural resources, the rapid development of economic and social needs, global change, extreme events, food security, water resources, sustainable economic and urban development, and emergency response. Application operation systems in many ministries and departments in China have entered a stage of sustainable development, and the State Key Project of High-Resolution Earth Observation Systems has been progressing since 2006. Earth observation technology in China has entered a period of rapid development.     

An object-level strategy for pan-sharpening quality assessment of high-resolution satellite imagery

Current satellite imaging systems offer a trade-off between high spatial and high spectral resolution providing panchromatic images at a higher spatial resolution and multispectral images at a lower spatial resolution but rich in spectral information while a wide range of applications need the highest level of this information, simultaneously. Image fusion techniques as means of enhancing the information content of initial panchromatic and multispectral images produce new images, titled pan-sharpened, which inherent the advantages of the initial images. Considering the impact of fusion accuracy on the quality of corresponding applications, it is necessary to evaluate the quality of these processed images. During the last decade, a lot of quality evaluation metrics have been proposed which are mostly inspired by traditional image quality metrics. These methods are mostly based on applying quality metrics at the pixel level and evaluating final quality value based on averaging of obtained metric values through the whole image. However, obtained results clearly show that the behaviour of image fusion quality is inconsistent amongst different image objects. In this article, by applying image fusion quality metrics (IFQMs) to image objects, an object-level strategy for quality assessment of the image fusion process is proposed. The proposed strategy is applied to different satellite imagery covering residential and agricultural areas. Experimental results show higher capabilities of object-level quality assessment strategy in the quality assessment of the fusion process. Evaluating fusion quality at the object level provides the potential of fusion quality assessment for each individual image object in compliance with different parameters such as the type of objects and the effective size of objects in data set.     

基于容栅技术数显力矩扳手无线通信系统的设计

随着无线通信技术的飞速发展，许多电气电子系统中的数据传输方式逐步使用无线通信方式替代原来的有线数据通信方式。目前我公司使用的基于容栅技术的数显力矩扳手广泛应用于航空航天、兵器、船舶、铁路等领域，对数据测量、数据存储都有严格的要求，而传统的有线数据传输方式，将对测量环境带来了极大的限制，而且传输距离短、接线方式复杂，由于计算机传输接口有限，将给大量的数据传输带来不便。本文则使用一种低功耗芯片设计了一款无线通信模块，将目前数显力矩扳手的通信方式通过有线数据传输改为无线通信技术传输。这将给客户应用带来了极大的便利，适应了不同的环境，挺高了产品的性能和市场竞争力，可以达到多组设备数据同时显示到计算机上，该产品已经过测试验证可以达到预期的效果。     

An IPC-based Prolog design pattern for integrating backward chaining inference into applications or embedded systems

Prolog is one of the most important candidates to build expert systems and AI-related programs and has potential applications in embedded systems. However, Prolog is not suitable to develop many kinds of components, such as data acquisition and task scheduling, which are also crucial. To make the best use of the advantages and bypass the disadvantages, it is attractive to integrate Prolog with programs developed by other languages. In this paper, an IPC-based method is used to integrate backward chaining inference implemented by Prolog into applications or embedded systems. A Prolog design pattern is derived from the method for reuse, whose principle and definition are provided in detail. Additionally, the design pattern is applied to a target system, which is free software, to verify its feasibility. The detailed implementation of the application is given to clarify the design pattern. The design pattern can be further applied to wide range applications and embedded systems and the method described in this paper can also be adopted for other logic programming languages.     

Solar-photon sail hovering orbits about single and binary asteroids

Solar-photon sails can be useful for missions towards and about asteroids. Indeed, for the interplanetary transfer phase, missions to asteroids often require a large variation in inclination and solar-photon sails perform very well for such high energy missions. In the same way, solar-photon sails are also expected to perform well in the phase about the asteroid. This paper studies single and binary asteroids’ hovering regions by using a sailcraft. In order to consider a sailcraft with its own mass and shape, the mutual polyhedral method (usually used to study asteroid dynamics) is used; therefore, the sailcraft is designed by means of tetrahedra. The procedure to obtain the hovering regions about a single asteroid is presented and an accurate analysis of the control variables is carried out. Moreover, control torques required to maintain hovering orbits are obtained by considering the gravitational torques acting on the sailcraft due to the asteroid. In the end, the theory for hovering orbits is extended to binary-asteroid systems and applied to the binary system 1999 KW4.