Suntracker balloon flights - 3033, 3034, 3035 and 3037 Final report
Preparations, field operations, and instrumentation for suntracker balloon flights
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Preparations, field operations, and instrumentation for suntracker balloon flights
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Spacecraft attitude sensor types, principles and future development
Balloon payload orientation system for viewing fixed position on celestial sphere
Canopus star sensor used for roll control of Mariner IV spacecraft
Unidentified landmark navigation from orbiting vehicle by computer simulation, noting instrumentation accuracies
The goal of NASA's Magellan mission is to understand the geological and geophysical processes that have shaped the planet Venus. Through synthetic aperture radar, radiometric, altimetric, and gravity measurements, the scientific community hopes to improve its knowledge of the planet's topography and internal mass distribution. This paper provides an overview of the Magellan mission; describes the spacecraft sequence software design, development, and test; addresses the nominal operational flow of stored sequence design and generation; briefly describes the ground processing of engineering telemetry and imaging data; and then summarizes the Magellan operational experience with non-routine behavior of the spacecraft during the cruise and mapping portions of the prime mission.
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This paper presents a method for separating cochannel FM signals. We show that the Viterbi algorithm, traditionally limited to estimation of digital quantities, can jointly track analog FM signals by quantizing the derivative of their instantaneous frequencies.
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Reducing mass and power demands from engineering and science image sensors, while improving system capability, remains a driving force in the development of Sciencecraft components.
The Cassini Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) is the prime attitude determination sensor on the Cassini spacecraft...To ensure that the SRU will operate within specification for the entire mission, an extensive test program has been undertaken to characterize the SRU performance prior to launch and to quantify any expected performance degradation. Results from several eomplimentary test programs are presented and compared with pre-test performance predictions.
This paper gives the status of theoretical and experimental efforts at JPL in the development of environmentally robust (radiation hard and radiation tolerant), ultra-low power, high performance CMOS active pixel sensor (APS) imagers for star tracker/imager applications.
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Muon-imaging technology — far better at penetrating materials than x-rays — makes it ideal for peering into thick, dense objects. While muon-imaging technology was developed for national security purposes, such as searching cargo shipments for nuclear materials, it could also be useful for determining what is inside any structure. Now, scientists at Los Alamos are using muons to look inside a nearly 600-year-old Italian church in hopes of preserving it for centuries to come.
Whole building commercial programs can be challenging to deliver due to their complexity and scope. A broad suite of Federal tools and reference standards can be leveraged to reduce program cost and risk, and improve scalability. The OpenEfficiency Initiative (OEI) is a DoE funded effort to expand the deployment of Federal tools and reference standards into whole building commercial efficiency programs. OEI is developing an open source data exchange platform which is being informed and motivated by pilots.
Despite the importance of reliability to the cost competitiveness of PV, large data sets enabling high-level investigation of the technology’s performance in the field are relatively scarce. Dirk C. Jordan, Chris Deline, Bill Marion and Teresa Barnes of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Mark Bolinger of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study a unique data set of 100,000 PV systems in the US, drawing out tips for better reliability that have relevance to other parts of the world.