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Analytical bounds on the performance of concatenated codes on a tree structure are obtained. Analytical results are applied to examples of parallel concatenation of two codes (turbo codes), serial concatenation of two codes, hybrid concatenation of three codes, and self concatenated codes, over AWGN and fading channels.
The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft performs trajectory correction maneuvers using either the 0.6 N Hydrazine thrusters of the reaction control system (RCS) or one of the two gimbaled 490 N bipropellant main engines.
The Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) mission is the unmanned flight test for the upcoming Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). During entry, the EFT-1 vehicle will trigger several Landing and Recovery System (LRS) events, such as parachute deployment, based on on-board altitude information. The primary altitude source is the filtered navigation solution updated with GPS measurement data. The vehicle also has three barometric altimeters that will be used to measure atmospheric pressure during entry. In the event that GPS data is not available during entry, the altitude derived from the barometric altimeter pressure will be used to trigger chute deployment for the drogues and main parachutes. Therefore it is important to understand the impact of error sources on the pressure measured by the barometric altimeters and on the altitude derived from that pressure. The error sources for the barometric altimeters are not independent, and many error sources result in bias in a specific direction. Therefore conventional error budget methods could not be applied. Instead, high fidelity Monte-Carlo simulation was performed and error bounds were determined based on the results of this analysis. Aerodynamic errors were the largest single contributor to the error budget for the barometric altimeters. The large errors drove a change to the altitude trigger setpoint for FBC jettison deploy.
With the increasing traffic in the lunar regime as part of NASA efforts to return humans to the moon. In order to support these missions, new capabilities are needed to support autonomous navigation and inter-asset communication. Additionally, with maturation and flight demonstration of increasingly capable small satellites, there is an opportunity to embed technology into a small spacecraft as part of companion missions. This paper addresses one such architecture, taking advantage of a lunar lander vehicle to host a companion spacecraft to build out lunar navigation and communication capability. The backbone of this spacecraft is the Navigator GPS receiver. This hardware has continually broken records on high altitude GPS coverage and has the potential to support autonomous navigation at lunar distances. This research proposes a large cubesat built around this technology and catching a ride to the moon via a lander mission. The concept of operations includes the spacecraft deploying prior to the lunar sphere of influence and maneuvering to enter into a lunar orbit. With the Navigator receiver, this spacecraft is capable of a large amount of autonomy, with a limited need for ground-based orbit determination. This spacecraft will fly alongside the lander, acting as a navigation reference during cruise, descent, and post-landing for mission validation. To assess this mission scenario, three aspects are covered in detail herein: the feasibility and mission requirements for entering into a lunar orbit given deployment along a lander surface-bound trajectory, the performance capability of the receiver along this transfer trajectory and in lunar orbit, and the ability to support navigation of the lander itself. These three areas are discussed in detail, providing results that support feasibility of the mission and determination of initial requirements.
The Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research and Experiments (ASPIRE) was a series of sounding rocket flights aimed at understanding the dynamics of supersonic parachutes that are used for Mars robotic applications. The 2012 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) had a successful deployment of a supersonic parachute, but based on post-flight analysis of parachute margins, the ASPIRE project was created as a risk-reduction program to improve quantification of these margins and qualify a supersonic parachute for Mars 2020, the follow-on mission to MSL. The first sounding rocket (SR01) flight of ASPIRE occurred near Wallops Island, Virginia on Oct. 4, 2017 and demonstrated the successful deployment and inflation of a MSL build-to-print parachute in flight conditions similar to the 2012 MSL mission. The ASPIRE SR02 and SR03 were successful follow-on flights on Mar. 31, 2018 and Sep. 7, 2018 that demonstrated the new, strengthened supersonic parachute designed for the Mars 2020 project. The SR02 and SR03 parachuteswere targeted to 100% and 140% of the expected flight limit load for Mars 2020 to confirm new margins expected from the strengthened parachute. Prior to all flights, a multi-body flight dynamics simulation was developed to predict the parachute dynamics and was used, in conjunction with other tools, to target Mars-relevant flight conditions. After each flight, the on-board data were used to reconstruct the flight trajectory and to validate the pre-flight dynamics simulation. Post-flight analysis showed that all three tests achieved their targeted conditions and pre-flight modeling bounded the key performance metrics for the parachute. This paper describes the flight mechanics simulation, post-flight reconstruction, and the reconciliation process used to validate the flight models.
In this paper, analytical bounds on the performance of parallel concatenation of two codes, known as turbo codes, and serial concatenation of two codes over fading channels are obtained.
Most deep space missions return data to Earth using links operating at a single frequency band. Indeed, their data requirements are low enough that bandwidth regulations do not constrain the system. In contrast, spacecraft such as Kepler or Europa Clipper are transitioning to a new operational paradigm where engineering and science data are transmitted through simultaneous links operating at different frequency bands (henceforth termed multi-band links). This ensures, for instance, that critical data is correctly received using a well characterized X-band link, while science data at a much larger data rate can be returned efficiently (both in terms of bandwidth and energy) through a Ka-band link.Having a spacecraft establish two simultaneous links with a ground station opens a large span of potential improvements for space communications and mission operations. In this paper, we consider the problem of running a Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) session over a multi-band link. LTP is an implementation of a selective Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol, i.e. it ensures correct delivery of data over an error prone link with potentially long propagation delays. To maximize its efficiency in deep space environments, LTP operates in deferred-ACK mode and is typically included as one of the core protocols in the Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) suite.The contributions of this paper are as follows: First, we propose an extension to LTP for multi-band links (denoted MBLTP) and sketch how it can be implemented without modifying the current definition of LTP data units. Next, we develop bounds on the performance of MBLTP when transmitting a single data file over a multi-band link. Three metrics are considered, file expected delivery time, total energy spent and bundle jitter. The results of the analytic model are first benchmarked against simulations to ensure validity, and then compared against the performance of both traditional LTP and Parallel LTP (PLTP).We demonstrate that MBLTP can significantly reduce the latency and jitter with which data products are delivered to destination over a deep space link compared to LTP at moderate energy cost. Similarly, we also demonstrate that MBLTP outperforms PLTP in all considered metrics.
Introduction: As humankind ventures further into the depths of space, planning is already underway for long-duration exploration missions that will test the bounds of human performance. Deep space travel will include added risk related to stressors from the isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environment that lies outside the boundaries of low-earth orbit. Currently, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are considered the gold standard treatment for many mental health diagnoses including anxiety and depression; however, SSRIs are also associated with several undesired side effects. The utility of non-pharmacologic therapies for the management of behavioral health conditions has not yet been fully explored. Methods: A comprehensive literature search was performed using PubMed and relevant articles pertaining to the psychological impacts of ICE environments, use of SSRIs in spaceflight, side effects associated with SSRIs, and non-pharmacologic treatments for anxiety and depression were reviewed. Over 100 studies were reviewed in total. Results: Reduced bone mineral density, impaired hemostatic function, significant individual variability resulting from gene polymorphisms, and drug-drug interactions are well described adverse effects of SSRIs that may complicate their operational use in the deep space environment. Many non-pharmacologic therapies have been utilized with success for the management of behavioral health conditions in the terrestrial environment that may show promise for long duration missions. Discussion: Although SSRIs have long been considered standard of care treatment for many behavioral health conditions, we cannot trivialize the risk that prolonged pharmacologic therapy may pose. The need to mitigate these risks by exploring alternative non-pharmacologic therapies has never been more relevant.
As the desired crack detection size is decreased and approaches the physical limitations of liquid penetrant inspection techniques, the approach of performing a probability of detection (POD) validation test at a single aspect ratio, and then extending the results to other aspect ratios based on equivalent area predictions may not be valid. POD testing for penetrant inspection of metallic pressure vessels and COPV liners should be performed at the bounds of the required range of crack aspect ratios.
The Terminal Area Productivity project has developed the technologies required (weather measurement, wake prediction, and wake measurement) to determine the aircraft spacing needed to prevent wake vortex encounters in various weather conditions. The system performs weather measurements, predicts bounds on wake vortex behavior in those conditions, derives safe wake spacing criteria, and validates the wake predictions with wake vortex measurements. System performance to date indicates that the potential runway arrival rate increase with Aircraft VOrtex Spacing System (AVOSS), considering common path effects and ATC delivery variance, is 5% to 12% depending on the ratio of large and heavy aircraft. The concept demonstration system, using early generation algorithms and minimal optimization, is performing the wake predictions with adequate robustness such that only 4 hard exceedances have been observed in 1235 wake validation cases. This performance demonstrates the feasibility of predicting wake behavior bounds with multiple uncertainties present, including the unknown aircraft weight and speed, weather persistence between the wake prediction and the observations, and the location of the weather sensors several kilometers from the approach location. A concept for the use of the AVOSS system for parallel runway operations has been suggested, and an initial study at the JFK International Airport suggests that a simplified AVOSS system can be successfully operated using only a single lidar as both the weather sensor and the wake validation instrument. Such a selfcontained AVOSS would be suitable for wake separation close to the airport, as is required for parallel approach concepts such as SOIA.
In this paper, the performance of the repeat-accumulate codes with (ML) decoding are analyzed and compared to random codes by very tight bounds. Some simple codes are shown that perform very close to Shannon limit with maximum likelihood decoding.
The OVERFLOW Machine Learning Airfoil Performance (PALMO) database has been created to enable robust modeling of airfoil performance in a variety of applications. The PALMO database uses OVERFLOW simulation data second-order accurate in time and fourth-order accurate in space with Spalart-Allmaras turbulence closure. The foundation of the in-development PALMO database is the airfoil base cube. Each base cube includes simulation data parametrized over a range of Mach numbers, Reynolds numbers, and angles-of-attack. This database includes the NACA 4-series airfoils, with parametrization in airfoil thickness and camber from an NACA 0006 to an NACA 4424. In total, 52,480 NACA 4-series OVERFLOW calculations were run on the NASA High-End Compute Capability (HECC) supercomputer. This provides high-order-accurate simulation data covering a wide range of aerospace design applications, which enables users to develop accurate airfoil performance look-up tables without additional high-performance computing. In addition to engineering design and analysis of aerospace vehicles, PALMO is well suited to be a benchmark dataset for the development and testing of machine learning methods in aerospace engineering. This work presents an example PALMO surrogate model that enables accurate airfoil performance predictions for any arbitrary combination of camber, thickness, Mach number, Reynolds number, and angle of attack within the bounds of the database. Airfoil performance tables predicted for an airfoil not used in training the model are used in three-dimensional OVERFLOW simulations to quantify the downstream accuracy on aggregate rotor performance metrics. For the NACA 3415 airfoil, which had no common thickness or camber with the training data, the surrogate predicted and CFD generated tables were within 2.1% of each other in the forward flight lift to drag metric. This suggests that performance tables generated for airfoils within the bounds of the PALMO database will yield aggregate rotor performance predictions on par with tables generated from directly running OVERFLOW airfoil calculations. The PALMO airfoil performance coefficients are available publicly.
A study of L-orthogonal signal performance represents an approach wherein the performance of polyphase and orthogonal signal sets stand out as the extreme special cases. The L-orthogonal signal model and its associated bandwidth properties are briefly discussed. System performance is investigated by presenting tight upper and lower bounds on the error probability performance of the maximum-likelihood receiver of L-orthogonal signals suggested by Reed and Scholtz (1966). A study of the error probability performance of the suboptimum receiver in the presence of noisy reference signals is also conducted.
Source encoding techniques based on permutation codes are investigated. For a broad class of distortion measures it is shown that optimum encoding of a source permutation code is easy to instrument even for very long block lengths. Also, the nonparametric nature of permutation encoding is well suited to situations involving unknown source statistics. For the squared-error distortion measure a procedure for generating good permutation codes of a given rate and block length is described. The performance of such codes for a memoryless Gaussian source is compared both with the rate-distortion function bound and with the performance of various quantization schemes. The comparison reveals that permutation codes are asymptotically ideal for small rates and perform as well as the best entropy-coded quantizers presently known for intermediate rates. They can be made to compare favorably at high rates, too, provided the coding delay associated with extremely long block lengths is tolerable.
The first paper presents a new minimum-weight trellis-based soft-decision iterative decoding algorithm for binary linear block codes. The second paper derives an upper bound on the probability of block error for multilevel concatenated codes (MLCC). The bound evaluates difference in performance for different decompositions of some codes. The third paper investigates the bit error probability code for maximum likelihood decoding of binary linear codes. The fourth and final paper included in this report is concerns itself with the construction of multilevel concatenated block modulation codes using a multilevel concatenation scheme for the frequency non-selective Rayleigh fading channel.
The performance of mean-frequency estimators for Doppler radar and lidar measurements of winds is presented in terms of two basic parameters: Phi, the ratio of the average signal energy per estimate to the spectral noise level; and Omega, which is proportional to the number of independent samples per estimate. For fixed Phi and Omega, the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) (theoretical best performance) for unbiased estimators of mean frequency (normalized by the spectral width of the signal), signal power, and spectral width are essentially independent of the number of data samples M. For large Phi, the estimators of mean frequency are unbiased and the performance is independent of M. The spectral domain estimators and covariance based estimators are bounded by the approximate period of M. The spectral domain estimators and covariance based estimators are bounded by the approximate periodogram CRB. The standard deviation of the maximum-likelihood estimator approaches the exact CRB, which can be more than a factor of 2 better than the performance of the spectral domain estimators or covariance-based estimators for typical Omega. For small Phi, the estimators are biased due to the effects of the uncorrelated noise (white noise), which results in uniformly distributed 'bad' estimates. The fraction of bad estimates is a function of Phi and M with weak dependence on the parameter Omega. Simple empirical models describe the standard deviation of the good estimates and the fraction of bad estimates. For Doppler lidar and for large Phi, better performance is obtained by using many low-energy pulses instead of one pulse with the same total energy. For small Phi, the converse is true.
Correction of shape distortion due to zero-mean normally distributed errors in structural sizes which are random variables is examined. A bound on the maximum improvement in the expected value of the root-mean-square shape error is obtained. The shape correction associated with the optimal actuators is also characterized. An actuator effectiveness index is developed and shown to be helpful in screening actuator locations in the structure. The results are specialized to a simple form for truss structures composed of nominally identical members. The bound and effectiveness index are tested on a 55-m radiometer antenna truss structure. It is found that previously obtained results for optimum actuators had a performance close to the bound obtained here. Furthermore, the actuators associated with the optimum design are shown to have high effectiveness indices. Since only a small fraction of truss elements tend to have high effectiveness indices, the proposed screening procedure can greatly reduce the number of truss members that need to be considered as actuator sites.
This paper deals with correction of shape distortion due to zero-mean normally distributed errors in structural sizes. The concept of ideal actuators - actuators that can produce any desired displacement field - is introduced. Using this concept, a bound on the possible improvement in the expected value of the root-mean-square shape error is obtained. The shape correction associated with the ideal actuators is also characterized. An actuator effectiveness index is developed by comparing the displacement field generated by the actuator to the ideal. The results are specialized to a simple form for truss structures composed of nominally identical members. The bound and effectiveness index are tested on a 55-m radiometer antenna truss structure. It is found that previously obtained results for optimum actuators had a performance close to the bound obtained here. Also, it is found that large numbers of actuators are needed for large reductions in shape errors. Furthermore, the actuators associated with the optimum design are shown to have high effectiveness indices. Since only a small fraction of truss elements tend to have high effectiveness indices, the use of the effectiveness index can greatly reduce the number of truss members that need to be considered actuator sites.