Engineering topics

Decker, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Decker, J..

4 records

NASA NTRS1996

Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor Bearing Anomaly

Early in 1993, a servo motor within one of three Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) reached stall torque levels on several occasions. Little time was left to plan replacement during the first servicing mission, scheduled at the end of '93. Accelerated bearing life tests confirmed that a small angle rocking motion, known as Coarse Track (CT), accelerated bearing degradation. Saturation torque levels were reached after approximately 20 million test cycles, similar to the flight bearings. Reduction in CT operation, implemented in flight software, extended FGS life well beyond the first servicing mission. However in recent years, bearing torques have resumed upward trends and together with a second, recent bearing torque anomaly has necessitated a scheduled FGS replacement during the upcoming second servicing mission in '97. The results from two series of life tests to quantify FGS bearing remaining life, discussion of bearing on-orbit performance, and future plans to service the FGS servos are presented in this paper.

Loewenthal, S.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Determination and characterization of the Hubble Space Telescope pointing stability

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was designed to maintian a pointing stability (jitter) of 0.007 arc seconds rms throughout every observing period, which can last from a few seconds to several orbits. On-orbit measurements indicate that the hardware excitation induced by the reaction wheels. gyros, high gain antennae, science instrument mechanisms and tape recorders are well within specifications. Unexpectedly, the solar arrays because the dominant source of jitter. Every passage through an orbital terminator produces vibrations which emanate from the solar arrays due to thermal effects, which affect the relative positional stability. Broadband frequencies centered about 0.11 and 0.65 Hz were detected in the frequency content of the vehicle jitter. On-board modifications to the control law have attenuated the disturbance torques and reduced the vehicle jitter close to specification. Replacement of the solar arrays in December, 1993, should eliminate the torque distubances. Astrometric science observations are extremely susceptible to corruption from vehicle jitter. The removal of vehicle jitter from astrometric Transfer function scans of binary stars is explained in detail. A binary star separation of 16 milli-seconds of arc has been achieved, a separation resolution of 10 to 12 milli-seconds of arc appears feasible, with a binary star magnitude of 9 m(sub V). The achievement of this resolution is in part due to vehicle jitter removal. Comparison of vehicle jitter measurements from the position path of the vehicle control law, or from the guiding Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS), are shown to be equivalent to approximately 0.001 arc second.

Bradley, A. J.↗

NASA NTRS1976

High Resolution Ozone Mapper (HROM)

Using the backscatter ultraviolet instrument (BUV) aboard NIMBUS 4 as a baseline, point scanner mechanisms and spatial multiplex scanning systems were compared on the basis of sensitivity, field of view and simplicity. This comparison included both spectral and spatial scanning and multiplexing techniques. The selected system which optimally met the performance requirements for a shuttle based instrument was a pushbroom spatial scanner using a 15 element photomultiplier tube array and a Hadamard multiplex spectral scan. The selected system was conceptually designed. This design includes ray traces of the monochromator, mechanical layouts and the electronic block diagram.

Kohr, J. R.↗

NASA NTRS1976

Development and evaluation of a Hadamard transform imaging spectrometer and a Hadamard transform thermal imager

A spectrometric imager and a thermal imager, which achieve multiplexing by the use of binary optical encoding masks, were developed. The masks are based on orthogonal, pseudorandom digital codes derived from Hadamard matrices. Spatial and/or spectral data is obtained in the form of a Hadamard transform of the spatial and/or spectral scene; computer algorithms are then used to decode the data and reconstruct images of the original scene. The hardware, algorithms and processing/display facility are described. A number of spatial and spatial/spectral images are presented. The achievement of a signal-to-noise improvement due to the signal multiplexing was also demonstrated. An analysis of the results indicates both the situations for which the multiplex advantage may be gained, and the limitations of the technique. A number of potential applications of the spectrometric imager are discussed.

Harwit, M.↗