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At least 613 records · Page 34

Spatial distributions of magnetic field fluctuations in the dayside magnetosheath

In a study that tests the hypothesis that magnetosheath magnetic fields are disturbed on plasma streamlines which are connected to the quasi-parallel bow shock, magnetometer observations from the ISEE 2 and IMP 8 spacecraft are used to investigate the dayside spatial distributions of fluctuating magnetosheath fields for different interplanetary field orientations. The results suggest that although other sources such as Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities and flux transfer processes probably contribute to the fluctuations in the magnetosheath field, the quasi-parallel shock source is an important contributor in the dayside region.

Luhmann, J. G.↗

Stability of the polar wind

The classical polar wind is an ambipolar outflow of thermal plasma from the terrestrial ionosphere at high latitudes. At altitudes above about 3000 km, the H(+) flow becomes supersonic and collisionless, and the H(+) velocity distribution becomes non-Maxwellian. The non-Maxwellian features include a temperature anisotropy, with the parallel H(+) temperature greater than the perpendicular temperature, and an asymmetry, with an elongated tail in the upward direction. These distortions from a Maxwellian increase as the H(+) gas escapes in the diverging geomagnetic field, and at 10 earth radii, the parallel-to-perpendicular temperature ratio is about 50 and the elongated tail is sufficiently long to move the drift velocity point off the peak of the distribution function. The stability of these highly non-Maxwellian H(+) velocity distributions was studied with regard to the excitation of electrostatic waves, and the plasma was found to be remarkably stable for a wide range of electron temperatures. This indicates that the various macroscopic formulations of the classical polar wind are valid. The stability of a perpendicularly heated polar wind was also studied, assuming bulk perpendicular heating of H(+) in the cusp, followed by the subsequent convection of the heated plasma into the polar cap. Two regions of instability were found.

Barakat, A. R.↗

The Monoplane as a Lifting Vortex Surface

In Prandtl's airfoil theory the monoplane was replaced by a single lifting vortex line and yielded fairly practical results. However, the theory remained restricted to the straight wing. Yawed wings and those curved in flight direction could not be computed with this first approximation; for these the chordwise lift distribution must be taken into consideration. For the two-dimensional problem the transition from the lifting line to the lifting surface has been explained by Birnbaum. In the present report the transition to the three-dimensional problem is undertaken. The first fundamental problem involves the prediction of flow, profile, and drag for prescribed circulation distribution on the straight rectangular wing, the yawed wing for lateral boundaries parallel to the direction of flight, the swept-back wing, and the rectangular wing in slipping, with the necessary series developments for carrying through the calculations, the practical range of convergence of which does not comprise the wing tips or the break point of the swept-back wing. The second problem concerns the calculation of the circulation distribution with given profile for a slipping rectangular monoplane with flat profile and aspect ratio 6, and a rectangular wing with cambered profile and variable aspect ratio-the latter serving as check of the so-called conversion formulas of the airfoil theory.

Blenk, Hermann↗

Thermal effects in face seals.

Incompressible fluid laminar and turbulent flow between face seal rotating parallel surfaces, considering conduction, convection and dissipation influence on thermal distribution

Sneck, H. J.↗

Topology of induced lunar magnetic fields

Using the asymmetric theory of lunar induction the total and induced magnetic field line structure within the Moon and the diamagnetic cavity were obtained. Total field distributions are shown for orientations of the oscillating interplanetary field parallel, perpendicular and at 45 deg to the cavity axis. Induced field lines are shown only for the orientations of the interplanetary field parallel and orthogonal to the cavity axis. When compared with the field lines derived using the long wavelength limit of spherically symmetric vacuum induction theory, the configurations obtained using the asymmetric theory exhibit significant distortion. For all orientations of the interplanetary field, the field lines are strongly compressed on the sunlit hemisphere because of the confining solar wind pressure at the lunar surface and the exclusion of the field by the lunar core.

Schwartz, K.↗

Molecular beam mass spectrometer development

An analytical model, based on the kinetics theory of a drifting Maxwellian gas is used to determine the nonequilibrium molecular density distribution within a hemispherical shell open aft with its axis parallel to its velocity. The concept of a molecular shield in terrestrial orbit above 200 km is also analyzed using the kinetic theory of a drifting Maxwellian gas. Data are presented for the components of the gas density within the shield due to the free stream atmosphere, outgassing from the shield and enclosed experiments, and atmospheric gas scattered off a shield orbiter system. A description is given of a FORTRAN program for computating the three dimensional transition flow regime past the space shuttle orbiter that employs the Monte Carlo simulation method to model real flow by some thousands of simulated molecules.

Brock, F. J.↗

Some correlation of rock exposure ages and regolith dynamics

Exposure age information on lunar rocks and regolith turnover rates are correlated. If plotted in a cumulative fashion, the distribution of spallogenic noble-gas exposure ages is remarkably parallel to the rate at which various fractions of the regolith surface are cratered and/or excavated. It appears that the rate at which lunar rocks are excavated from within the regolith is strongly controlled by the impact environment. Some suggestions for future refinement of regolith dynamics are presented.

Horz, F.↗

Electron heating within the earth's bow shock

High-temporal-resolution measurements of electron velocity distributions have been obtained for many transits through the earth's bow shock. Within all oblique shocks studied, the maximum of the electron velocity distribution is offset with respect to the ion rest frame parallel to the magnetic field vector and directed downstream. These observations indicate that electron thermalization within the bow shock consists first of a downstream acceleration parallel to the magnetic field vector by the macroscopic shock electric field, followed by beam-driven plasma instabilities.

Feldman, W. C.↗

Interplanetary magnetic field effects on high latitude ionospheric convection

Relations between the electric field and the electric current in the ionosphere can be established on the basis of a system of mathematical and physical equations provided by the equations of current continuity and Ohm's law. For this reason, much of the synthesis of electric field and plasma velocity data in the F-region is made with the aid of similar data sets derived from field-aligned current and horizontal current measurements. During the past decade, the development of a self-consistent picture of the distribution and behavior of these measurements has proceeded almost in parallel. The present paper is concerned with the picture as it applies to the electric field and plasma drift velocity and its dependence on the interplanetary magnetic field. Attention is given to the southward interplanetary magnetic field and the northward interplanetary magnetic field.

Heelis, R. A.↗

Ion specific differences in energetic field aligned upflowing ions at 1 earth radius

An ion-upflow event over the northern auroral zone during a small magnetic storm on August 24, 1976 is characterized on the basis of S3-3 satellite ion-mass-spectrometer observations at 0.5-16 keV. The data are presented in tables, graphs, and diagrams and analyzed in detail. The distributions of upward-flowing O(+) and H(+) associated with parallel electric fields below the satellite are shown to have transverse temperatures of about 1 keV and 0.1 keV, respectively, while the corresponding parallel temperatures were about 1 keV and 0.6 keV; the average energy of the O(+) ions is found to be 2-3 times greater than that of the H(+) ions in the acceleration regions. Possible interpretations of these findings are discussed.

Ghielmetti, A. G.↗

Cosmic-ray hydrodynamics at relativistic shocks

A test particle description of first-order Fermi acceleration of cosmic rays at plane-parallel relativistic shocks is presented in which the pitch angle distribution is obtained explicitly and used to determine the pressure anisotropy or variable Eddington factor as a function of position. The Eddington factor is in turn used to find the hydrodynamical cosmic-ray sound speed, taking the anisotropy into account. For upstream flows speeds above c/sq rt 3, it is shown that the cosmic-ray sound speed exceeds the shock speed in a region just upstream of the shock and decreases montonically with distance further upstream, reaching the value c/sq rt 3 far from the shock. Thus, the shock succeeds in maintaining an anisotropy in the cosmic-ray distribution which is sufficient to keep the flow subsonic with respect to the cosmic-ray sound speed both downstream and in a finite region upstream. The astrophysical implications of these findings are discussed.

Kirk, J. G.↗

Parallel arrays of Josephson junctions for submillimeter local oscillators

In this paper we discuss the influence of the DC biasing circuit on operation of parallel biased quasioptical Josephson junction oscillator arrays. Because of nonuniform distribution of the DC biasing current along the length of the bias lines, there is a nonuniform distribution of magnetic flux in superconducting loops connecting every two junctions of the array. These DC self-field effects determine the state of the array. We present analysis and time-domain numerical simulations of these states for four biasing configurations. We find conditions for the in-phase states with maximum power output. We compare arrays with small and large inductances and determine the low inductance limit for nearly-in-phase array operation. We show how arrays can be steered in H-plane using the externally applied DC magnetic field.

Pance, Aleksandar↗

Supercomputing '91; Proceedings of the 4th Annual Conference on High Performance Computing, Albuquerque, NM, Nov. 18-22, 1991

Various papers on supercomputing are presented. The general topics addressed include: program analysis/data dependence, memory access, distributed memory code generation, numerical algorithms, supercomputer benchmarks, latency tolerance, parallel programming, applications, processor design, networks, performance tools, mapping and scheduling, characterization affecting performance, parallelism packaging, computing climate change, combinatorial algorithms, hardware and software performance issues, system issues. (No individual items are abstracted in this volume)

Source record↗

Boundary element analysis on vector and parallel computers

Boundary element analysis (BEA) can be characterized as a numerical technique that generally shifts the computational burden in the analysis toward numerical integration and the solution of nonsymmetric and either dense or blocked sparse systems of algebraic equations. Researchers have explored the concept that the fundamental characteristics of BEA can be exploited to generate effective implementations on vector and parallel computers. In this paper, the results of some of these investigations are discussed. The performance of overall algorithms for BEA on vector supercomputers, massively data parallel single instruction multiple data (SIMD), and relatively fine grained distributed memory multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) computer systems is described. Some general trends and conclusions are discussed, along with indications of future developments that may prove fruitful in this regard.

Kane, J. H.↗

Parallelization of Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories (POST3D)

This paper describes the parallelization of the Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories (POST3D). POST3D uses a gradient-based optimization algorithm that reaches an optimum design point by moving from one design point to the next. The gradient calculations required to complete the optimization process, dominate the computational time and have been parallelized using a Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) on a distributed memory NUMA (non-uniform memory access) architecture. The Origin2000 was used for the tests presented.

Hammond, Dana P.↗

Benchmarking Memory Performance with the Data Cube Operator

Data movement across a computer memory hierarchy and across computational grids is known to be a limiting factor for applications processing large data sets. We use the Data Cube Operator on an Arithmetic Data Set, called ADC, to benchmark capabilities of computers and of computational grids to handle large distributed data sets. We present a prototype implementation of a parallel algorithm for computation of the operatol: The algorithm follows a known approach for computing views from the smallest parent. The ADC stresses all levels of grid memory and storage by producing some of 2d views of an Arithmetic Data Set of d-tuples described by a small number of integers. We control data intensity of the ADC by selecting the tuple parameters, the sizes of the views, and the number of realized views. Benchmarking results of memory performance of a number of computer architectures and of a small computational grid are presented.

Frumkin, Michael A.↗

Heat Transfer in the Turbulent Boundary Layer of a Compressible Gas at High Speeds

The Reynolds law of heat transfer from a wall to a turbulent stream is extended to the case of flow of a compressible gas at high speeds. The analysis is based on the modern theory of the turbulent boundary layer with laminar sublayer. The investigation is carried out for the case of a plate situated in a parallel stream. The results are obtained independently of the velocity distribution in the turbulent boundar layer.

Frankl, F.↗

Controlling Infrastructure Costs: Right-Sizing the Mission Control Facility

Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Center is a space vehicle, space program agnostic facility. The current operational design is essentially identical to the original facility architecture that was developed and deployed in the mid-90's. In an effort to streamline the support costs of the mission critical facility, the Mission Operations Division (MOD) of Johnson Space Center (JSC) has sponsored an exploratory project to evaluate and inject current state-of-the-practice Information Technology (IT) tools, processes and technology into legacy operations. The general push in the IT industry has been trending towards a data-centric computer infrastructure for the past several years. Organizations facing challenges with facility operations costs are turning to creative solutions combining hardware consolidation, virtualization and remote access to meet and exceed performance, security, and availability requirements. The Operations Technology Facility (OTF) organization at the Johnson Space Center has been chartered to build and evaluate a parallel Mission Control infrastructure, replacing the existing, thick-client distributed computing model and network architecture with a data center model utilizing virtualization to provide the MCC Infrastructure as a Service. The OTF will design a replacement architecture for the Mission Control Facility, leveraging hardware consolidation through the use of blade servers, increasing utilization rates for compute platforms through virtualization while expanding connectivity options through the deployment of secure remote access. The architecture demonstrates the maturity of the technologies generally available in industry today and the ability to successfully abstract the tightly coupled relationship between thick-client software and legacy hardware into a hardware agnostic "Infrastructure as a Service" capability that can scale to meet future requirements of new space programs and spacecraft. This paper discusses the benefits and difficulties that a migration to cloud-based computing philosophies has uncovered when compared to the legacy Mission Control Center architecture. The team consists of system and software engineers with extensive experience with the MCC infrastructure and software currently used to support the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle program (SSP).

Martin, Keith↗