SYSTEM INCLUDING CONOSCOPE LENS FOR MEASURING POLARIZATION CHARACTERISTICS OF WIDE FIELD-OF-VIEW LENSES

A lens measurement system including 1) a light source, 2) a lens mounting support configured to hold a lens so that light emitted by the light source is incident on the lens, 3) a conoscope lens positioned to receive light refracted by the lens, and 4) a polarization camera positioned to receive light emitted from the conoscope lens

Satellite-aided mobile communications limited operational test in the trucking industry

An experiment with NASA's ATS-6 satellite, that demonstrates the practicality of satellite-aided land mobile communications is described. Satellite communications equipment for the experiment was designed so that it would be no more expensive, when mass produced, than conventional two-way mobile radio equipment. It embodied the operational features and convenience of present day mobile radios. Vehicle antennas 75 cm tall and 2 cm in diameter provided good commercial quality signals to and from trucks and jeeps. Operational applicability and usage data were gathered by installing the radio equipment in five long-haul tractor-trailer trucks and two Air Force search and rescue jeeps. Channel occupancy rates are reported. Air Force personnel found the satellite radio system extremely valuable in their search and rescue mission during maneuvers and actual rescue operations. Propagation data is subjectively analyzed and over 4 hours of random data is categorized and graded as to signal quality on a second by second basis. Trends in different topographic regions are reported. An overall communications reliability of 93% was observed despite low satellite elevation angles ranging from 9 to 24 degrees

Index to 1984 NASA Tech Briefs, volume 9, numbers 1-4

Short announcements of new technology derived from the R&D activities of NASA are presented. These briefs emphasize information considered likely to be transferrable across industrial, regional, or disciplinary lines and are issued to encourage commercial application. This index for 1984 Tech B Briefs contains abstracts and four indexes: subject, personal author, originating center, and Tech Brief Number. The following areas are covered: electronic components and circuits, electronic systems, physical sciences, materials, life sciences, mechanics, machinery, fabrication technology, and mathematics and information sciences

Acoustic node calibration using moving sources

Acoustic nodes, each containing an array of microphones, can track targets in x-y space from their received acoustic signals, if the node positions and orientations are known exactly. However, it is not always possible to deploy the nodes precisely, so a calibration phase is needed to estimate the position and the orientation of each node before doing any tracking or localization. An acoustic node can be calibrated from sources of opportunity such as beacons or a moving source. In this paper, we derive and compare several calibration methods for the case where the node can hear a moving source whose position can be reported back to the node. Since calibration from a moving source is, in effect, the dual of a tracking problem, methods derived for acoustic target trackers are used to obtain robust and high resolution acoustic calibration processes. For example, two direction-of-arrival-based calibration methods can be formulated based on combining angle estimates, geometry, and the motion dynamics of the moving source. In addition, a maximum-likelihood (ML) solution is presented using a narrow-band acoustic observation model, along with a Newton-based search algorithm that speeds up the calculation the likelihood surface. The Cramer-Rao lower bound on the node position estimates is also derived to show that the effect of position errors for the moving source on the estimated node position is much less severe than the variance in angle estimates from the microphone array. The performance of the calibration algorithms is demonstrated on synthetic and field data