Guidance and Control Software Project Data - Volume 4: Configuration Management and Quality Assurance Documents

The Guidance and Control Software (GCS) project was the last in a series of software reliability studies conducted at Langley Research Center between 1977 and 1994. The technical results of the GCS project were recorded after the experiment was completed. Some of the support documentation produced as part of the experiment, however, is serving an unexpected role far beyond its original project context. Some of the software used as part of the GCS project was developed to conform to the RTCA/DO-178B software standard, "Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification," used in the civil aviation industry. That standard requires extensive documentation throughout the software development life cycle, including plans, software requirements, design and source code, verification cases and results, and configuration management and quality control data. The project documentation that includes this information is open for public scrutiny without the legal or safety implications associated with comparable data from an avionics manufacturer. This public availability has afforded an opportunity to use the GCS project documents for DO-178B training. This report provides a brief overview of the GCS project, describes the 4-volume set of documents and the role they are playing in training, and includes configuration management and quality assurance documents from the GCS project. Volume 4 contains six appendices: A. Software Accomplishment Summary for the Guidance and Control Software Project; B. Software Configuration Index for the Guidance and Control Software Project; C. Configuration Management Records for the Guidance and Control Software Project; D. Software Quality Assurance Records for the Guidance and Control Software Project; E. Problem Report for the Pluto Implementation of the Guidance and Control Software Project; and F. Support Documentation Change Reports for the Guidance and Control Software Project

Towards the identification of spatially resolved mechanical properties in tissues and materials: State of the art, current challenges and opportunities in the field of flow measurements

This paper was presented at the 4th Micro and Nano Flows Conference (MNF2014), which was held at University College, London, UK. The conference was organised by Brunel University and supported by the Italian Union of Thermofluiddynamics, IPEM, the Process Intensification Network, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Heat Transfer Society, HEXAG - the Heat Exchange Action Group, and the Energy Institute, ASME Press, LCN London Centre for Nanotechnology, UCL University College London, UCL Engineering, the International NanoScience Community, www.nanopaprika.eu.This work is focused on optical methods that provide tomographic reconstructions of the structure of materials and tissues. Phase information can also be used to measure 3-D displacement and strain fields with interferometric sensitivity. Different approaches are presented, including recent developments in phase contrast wavelength scanning interferometry and a combination of optical coherence tomography and digital volume correlation to estimate elastic properties of synthetic phantoms and porcine corneas. Inversion algorithms based on finite elements and the Virtual Fields Method (VFM) are used to extract mechanical properties from the knowledge of the applied loads, geometry and measured deformation fields. Current efforts into extending these methods into single shot techniques have the potential of expanding the range of applications to study dynamic events such as micro-flows in engineering and biological systems in which scattering particles are transported in a flow, e.g. tribology, microfluidic devices, cell migration or multiphase flows

Secure Cloud Storage: A Framework for Data Protection as a Service in the Multi-cloud Environment

This paper introduces Secure Cloud Storage (SCS), a framework for Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) to cloud computing users. Compared to the existing Data Encryption as a Service (DEaaS) such as those provided by Amazon and Google, DPaaS provides more flexibility to protect data in the cloud. In addition to supporting the basic data encryption capability as DEaaS does, DPaaS allows users to define fine-grained access control policies to protect their data. Once data is put under an access control policy, it is automatically encrypted and only if the policy is satisfied, the data could be decrypted and accessed by either the data owner or anyone else specified in the policy. The key idea of the SCS framework is to separate data management from security management in addition to defining a full cycle of data security automation from encryption to decryption. As a proof-of-concept for the design, we implemented a prototype of the SCS framework that works with both BT Cloud Compute platform and Amazon EC2. Experiments on the prototype have proved the efficiency of the SCS framework

SONTRAC: an imaging spectrometer for solar neutrons

An instrument capable of unambiguously determining the energy and direction of incident neutrons has important applications in solar physics-as well as environmental monitoring and medical/radiological sciences. The SONTRAC (SOlar Neutron TRACking) instrument is designed to operate in the neutron energy range of 20-250 MeV. The measurement principle is based on non-relativistic double scatter of neutrons off ambient protons (n-p scattering) within a block of densely packed scintillating fibers. Using this double-scatter mode it is possible to uniquely determine neutron energy and direction on an event-by-event basis. A fully operational science model of such an instrument has been built using 300 μm (250 μm active) scintillating fibers. The science model consists of a 5×5×5 cm cube of orthogonal plastic scintillating fiber layers. Two orthogonal imaging chains, employing image intensifiers and CCD cameras, allow full 3-dimensional reconstruction of scattered proton particle tracks. We report the results of the science model instrument calibration using 35-65 MeV protons. The proton calibration is the first step toward understanding the instrument response to n-p scatter events. Preliminary results give proton energy resolution of 2% (6%) at 67.5 (35) MeV, and angular resolution of 2° (4.5°) at 67.5 (35) MeV. These measurements are being used to validate detailed instrument simulations that will be used to optimize the instrument design and develop quantitative estimates of science return. Based on the proton calibration, neutron energy and angular resolution for a 10×10×10 cm version of SONTRAC is expected to be ~5% an