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At least 1,369 records · Page 76
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1977

A structure suitable for implementing digital filters with poles near z = +1

Errors limiting the application of recursive digital filters which have poles near z = +1 are considered, and a filter structure for pole locations close to z = +1 is proposed. The filter structure, based on digital incremental computers, has low sensitivity and good error characteristics for pole locations near z = +1. Expressions for the roundoff error are derived, and errors associated with the proposed structure and a conventional structure are compared. A design procedure is suggested for implementing the new filter structure when the transfer function is given. Simulation results are presented.

Abu-El-haija, A. I.↗
NASA NTRS1978

Performance analysis of pulse Doppler digital radars with application to the Shuttle Ku-band system

A pulse Doppler digital radar is one of the primary components of the Ku-band integrated radar and communication equipment on the Space Shuttle. The performance of the Ku-band rendezvous radar to be used on the Space Shuttle is analyzed in four parts. First an overall functional block diagram description is presented to illustrate the signal processing in the detection and the tracking modes. The detection capabilities and limitations of the radar are investigated taking all of the system losses into account. A new unified analysis of digital radar tracking loops is developed which takes into consideration the effects of a scintillating target and receiver front end noise. The behavior of the radar is discussed in the presence of thermal noise, amplitude scintillation, and target glint.

Alem, W. K.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Using Landsat digital data to detect moisture stress

A technique utilizing transformed Landsat digital data for detection of agricultural drought was empirically defined during the 1976 South Dakota drought. During 1977, the procedure was expanded to the Great Plains for evaluation as a technique for detecting and monitoring vegetative water stress over large areas. The technique, Green Index Number (GIN), uses Landsat digital data from 5 by 6 nautical mile sampling frames (segments) to indicate when the vegetation within the segment is undergoing drought. At known growth stages for wheat, segments were classified as drought or non-drought areas. The remote-sensing-based information was compared to a weekly ground-based index (Crop Moisture Index) provided by the United States Department of Commerce. This comparison demonstrated a high degree of agreement between the 18-day remote sensing technique and the ground-based weekly data. Maps based on GIN of parts of the USSR and Australia were produced with a two-week lag and later compared with other crop assessments of crop conditions in these areas. These maps were judged to be in general agreement with the other data sources.

Thompson, D. R.↗
NASA NTRS1978

Fault-tolerance - The survival attribute of digital systems

Fault-tolerance is the architectural attribute of a digital system that keeps the logic machine doing its specified tasks when its host, the physical system, suffers various kinds of failures of its components. A more general concept of fault-tolerance also includes human mistakes committed during software and hardware implementation and during man/machine interaction among the causes of faults that are to be tolerated by the logic machine. This paper discusses the concept of fault-tolerance, the reasons for its inclusion in digital system architecture, and the methods of its implementation. A chronological view of the evolution of fault-tolerant systems and an outline of some goals for its further development conclude the presentation.

Avizienis, A.↗
NASA NTRS1979

A structure for digital notch filters

Narrow-band digital notch filters have their poles near the unit circle. As the sampling rate is increased, the poles move towards Z = +1. Implementing such filters requires long registers to overcome the sensitivity and roundoff errors. A filter structure based on digital incremental computers is proposed which has low sensitivity and round-off errors, and simple hardware implementation. The filter structure can be directly used on differentially pulse-code modulated signals. Hardware multipliers are not required as the poles approach z = +1, and excellent results can be obtained using multipliers with very short word lengths, or with small size read-only memories.

Abu-El-haija, A. I.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Radiometric correction and equalization of satellite digital data

Satellite digital data from Landsat and NOAA satellites is often marred by striping or streaking errors due to variations in the response of the radiometric sensors. In this paper, we discuss the equalization of the digital data as a preprocessing step, prior to image enhancement or automatic classification. The methods described make use of statistics of the data itself to generate nonlinear or linear memory-less equalization algorithms. These algorithms, by contrast to multidimensional filtering, do not result in a loss of spatial resolution. Examples of applications to Landsat and NOAA-3 thermal infrared data are given and illustrated.

Algazi, V. R.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Flight test of a VTOL digital autoland system along complex trajectories

The objective of this research is the development and flight test of a digital multi-rate VTOL autoland system. This autoland system provided the NASA/Army Fly-by-Wire CH-47 helicopter with an automatic 4-D trajectory following and landing capability. Flight tests were conducted along complex trajectories with descending, turning, and decelerating segments. The flight software consists of a trajectory generator and guidance algorithm operating at two iterations per second and a set of sensor filters and an advanced controller operating at 10 iterations per second. This low iteration rate digital controller has a proportional-integral structure that provides an autotrim function. The control gains, scheduled as a function of flight condition, are updated every two seconds. All flight software, except input/output routines, are coded in FORTRAN using floating point arithmetic and are exercised in a ROLM 1664 flight computer. The flight software, the ground and flight hardware, the autoland system's position tracking performance, and the controller's velocity and heading tracking performance are presented.

Downing, D. R.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Issues in the digital implementation of control compensators

Techniques developed for the finite-precision implementation of digital filters were used, adapted, and extended for digital feedback compensators, with particular emphasis on steady state, linear-quadratic-Gaussian compensators. Topics covered include: (1) the linear-quadratic-Gaussian problem; (2) compensator structures; (3) architectural issues: serialism, parallelism, and pipelining; (4) finite wordlength effects: quantization noise, quantizing the coefficients, and limit cycles; and (5) the optimization of structures.

Moroney, P.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Loran digital phase-locked loop and RF front-end system error analysis

An analysis of the system performance of the digital phase locked loops (DPLL) and RF front end that are implemented in the MINI-L4 Loran receiver is presented. Three of the four experiments deal with the performance of the digital phase locked loops. The other experiment deals with the RF front end and DPLL system error which arise in the front end due to poor signal to noise ratios. The ability of the DPLLs to track the offsets is studied.

Mccall, D. L.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Weighting in digital synthetic aperture radar processing

Weighting is employed in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing to reduce the sidelobe response at the expense of peak center response height and mainlobe resolution. The weighting effectiveness in digital processing depends not only on the choice of weighting function, but on the fineness of sampling and quantization, on the time bandwidth product, on the quadratic phase error, and on the azimuth antenna pattern. The results of simulations conducted to uncover the effect of these parameters on azimuth weighting effectiveness are presented. In particular, it is shown that multilook capabilities of future SAR systems may obviate the need for consideration of the antenna pattern, and that azimuth time-bandwidth products of over 200 are probably required before the digital results begin to approach the ideal results.

Dicenzo, A.↗
NASA NTRS1980

Developing, mechanizing and testing of a digital active flutter suppression system for a modified B-52 wind-tunnel model

A digital flutter suppression system was developed and mechanized for a significantly modified version of the 1/30-scale B-52E aeroelastic wind tunnel model. A model configuration was identified that produced symmetric and antisymmetric flutter modes that occur at 2873N/sq m (60 psf) dynamic pressure with violent onset. The flutter suppression system, using one trailing edge control surface and the accelerometers on each wing, extended the flutter dynamic pressure of the model beyond the design limit of 4788N/sq m (100 psf). The hardware and software required to implement the flutter suppression system were designed and mechanized using digital computers in a fail-operate configuration. The model equipped with the system was tested in the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel at NASA Langley Research Center and results showed the flutter dynamic pressure of the model was extended beyond 4884N/sq m (102 psf).

Matthew, J. R.↗
NASA NTRS1980

Use of a digital tone extractor for real-time phase analysis

A digital tone extractor which monitors the phase integrity of a VLBI recording system in real time was developed. The digital tone extractor monitors phase calibrator tones injected at the antenna and tracks their phase as a function of time. It is capable of maintaining 0.001 cycle phase accuracy over the course of a VLBI experiment in accordance with the accuracy requirements of centimeter VLBI work. This real time VLBI system monitor is a safeguard against most instrumental breakdowns and operator errors.

Sigman, E.↗
NASA NTRS1980

Mark 3 wideband digital recorder in perspective

The tape recorder used for the Mark 3 data acquisition and processing system is compared with earlier very long baseline interferometry recorders. Wideband 33-1/3 kbpi digital channel characteristics of instrumentation recorders and of a modern video cassette recorder are illustrated. Factors which influenced selection of the three major commercial components (transport, heads, and tape) are discussed. A brief functional description and the reasons for development of efficient signal electronics and necessary auxiliary control electronics are given. The design and operation of a digital bit synchronizer is illustrated as an example of the high degree of simplicity achieved.

Hinteregger, H. F.↗
NASA NTRS1980

Digital recording acquisition subsystem for radio interferometry applications implementation plan

The digital recording acquisition subsystem (DRAS) is a wideband digital recording system that can accommodate data sample rates from 0.125 to 8 MHz in binary increments. The implementation of the DRAS for radio interferometry applications in support of the Crustal Dynamics Project is described. The functional and performance characteristics of the equipment and the key aspects of the implementation plan are discussed.

Kapoor, V. B.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Error detection and rectification in digital terrain models

Digital terrain models produced by computer correlation of stereo images are likely to contain occasional gross errors in terrain elevation. These errors typically result from having mismatched sub-areas of the two images, a problem which can occur for a variety of image- and terrain-related reasons. Such elevation errors produce undesirable effects when the models are further processed, and should be detected and corrected as early in the processing as possible. Algorithms have been developed to detect and correct errors in digital terrain models. These algorithms focus on the use of constraints on both the allowable slope and the allowable change in slope in local areas around each point. Relaxation-like techniques are employed in the iteration of the detection and correction phases to obtain best results.

Hannah, M. J.↗
NASA NTRS1980

A quadratic analog-to-digital converter

An analog-to-digital converter with a square root transfer function has been developed for use with a pair of CCD imaging detectors in the White Light Coronagraph/X-ray XUV Telescope experiment to be flown as part of the Internal Solar Polar Mission. It is shown that in background-noise-limited instrumentation systems a quadratic analog-to-digital converter will allow a maximum dynamic range with a fixed number of data bits. Low power dissipation, moderately fast conversion time, and reliability are achieved in the proposed design using standard components and avoiding nonlinear elements.

Harrison, D. C.↗
NASA NTRS1980

The digital implementation of control compensators - The coefficient wordlength issue

There exist a number of mathematical procedures for designing discrete-time compensators. However, the digital implementation of these designs, with a microprocessor, for example, has not received nearly as thorough an investigation. The finite-precision nature of the digital hardware makes it necessary to choose a computational structure that will perform adequately with regard to the initial objectives of the design. This paper describes a procedure for estimating the required fixed-point coefficient wordlength for any given computational structure for the implementation of a single-input single-output LQG design. The results are compared to the actual number of bits necessary to achieve a specified performance index.

Moroney, P.↗
NASA NTRS1979

A method for the processing and analysis of digital terrain elevation data

A method is presented for the processing and analysis of digital topography data that can subsequently be entered in an interactive data base in the form of slope, slope length, elevation, and aspect angle. A discussion of the data source and specific descriptions of the data processing software programs are included. In addition, the mathematical considerations involved in the registration of raw digitized coordinate points to the UTM coordinate system are presented. Scale factor considerations are also included. Results of the processing and analysis are illustrated using the Shiprock and Gallup Quadrangle test data.

Junkin, B. G.↗