A preliminary experiment definition for video landmark acquisition and tracking

Six scientific objectives/experiments were derived which consisted of agriculture/forestry/range resources, land use, geology/mineral resources, water resources, marine resources and environmental surveys. Computer calculations were then made of the spectral radiance signature of each of 25 candidate targets as seen by a satellite sensor system. An imaging system capable of recognizing, acquiring and tracking specific generic type surface features was defined. A preliminary experiment definition and design of a video Landmark Acquisition and Tracking system is given. This device will search a 10-mile swath while orbiting the earth, looking for land/water interfaces such as coastlines and rivers

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 295)

This bibliography lists 581 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System in Sep. 1993. Subject coverage includes: design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment, and systems; ground support systems; and theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics

AFIT School of Engineering Contributions to Air Force Research and Technology Calendar Year 1973

This report contains abstracts of Master of Science Theses, Doctoral dissertations, and selected faculty publications completed during the 1973 calendar year at the School of Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study

This report describes the results of a study sponsored by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) to investigate the feasibility of identifying, robotically capturing, and returning an entire Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) to the vicinity of the Earth by the middle of the next decade. The KISS study was performed by people from Ames Research Center, Glenn Research Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Johnson Space Center, Langley Research Center, the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard University, the Naval Postgraduate School, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Southern California, Arkyd Astronautics, Inc., The Planetary Society, the B612 Foundation, and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

AFIT School of Engineering Contributions to Air Force Research and Technology Calendar Year 1973

This report contains abstracts of Master of Science Theses, Doctoral dissertations, and selected faculty publications completed during the 1973 calendar year at the School of Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

Proceedings of the Fourth MIT/ONR Workshop on Distributed Information and Decision Systems Motivated by Command-Control-Communications (C3) Problems, June 15-June 26, 1981, San Diego, California

"OSP number 85552"--Cover.Library has v. 2 only.Includes bibliographies.Workshop suppported by the Office of Naval Research under contract ONR/N00014-77-C-0532edited by Michael Athans ... [et al.].v.1. Surveillance and target tracking--v.2. Systems architecture and evaluation--v.3. Communication, data bases & decision support--v.4. C3 theory

Sensors, measurement fusion and missile trajectory optimisation

When considering advances in “smart” weapons it is clear that air-launched systems have adopted an integrated approach to meet rigorous requirements, whereas air-defence systems have not. The demands on sensors, state observation, missile guidance, and simulation for air-defence is the subject of this research. Historical reviews for each topic, justification of favoured techniques and algorithms are provided, using a nomenclature developed to unify these disciplines. Sensors selected for their enduring impact on future systems are described and simulation models provided. Complex internal systems are reduced to simpler models capable of replicating dominant features, particularly those that adversely effect state observers. Of the state observer architectures considered, a distributed system comprising ground based target and own-missile tracking, data up-link, and on-board missile measurement and track fusion is the natural choice for air-defence. An IMM is used to process radar measurements, combining the estimates from filters with different target dynamics. The remote missile state observer combines up-linked target tracks and missile plots with IMU and seeker data to provide optimal guidance information. The performance of traditional PN and CLOS missile guidance is the basis against which on-line trajectory optimisation is judged. Enhanced guidance laws are presented that demand more from the state observers, stressing the importance of time-to-go and transport delays in strap-down systems employing staring array technology. Algorithms for solving the guidance twopoint boundary value problems created from the missile state observer output using gradient projection in function space are presented. A simulation integrating these aspects was developed whose infrastructure, capable of supporting any dynamical model, is described in the air-defence context. MBDA have extended this work creating the Aircraft and Missile Integration Simulation (AMIS) for integrating different launchers and missiles. The maturity of the AMIS makes it a tool for developing pre-launch algorithms for modern air-launched missiles from modern military aircraft.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study

This report describes the results of a study sponsored by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) to investigate the feasibility of identifying, robotically capturing, and returning an entire Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) to the vicinity of the Earth by the middle of the next decade. The KISS study was performed by people from Ames Research Center, Glenn Research Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Johnson Space Center, Langley Research Center, the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard University, the Naval Postgraduate School, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Southern California, Arkyd Astronautics, Inc., The Planetary Society, the B612 Foundation, and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. The feasibility of an asteroid retrieval mission hinges on finding an overlap between the smallest NEAs that could be reasonably discovered and characterized and the largest NEAs that could be captured and transported in a reasonable flight time. This overlap appears to be centered on NEAs roughly 7 m in diameter corresponding to masses in the range of 250,000 kg to 1,000,000 kg. To put this in perspective, the Apollo program returned 382 kg of Moon rocks in six missions and the OSIRIS-REx mission proposes to return at least 60 grams of surface material from a NEA by 2023. The present study indicates that it would be possible to return a ~500,000-kg NEA to high lunar orbit by around 2025. The idea of exploiting the natural resources of asteroids dates back over a hundred years, but only now has the technology become available to make this idea a reality. The feasibility is enabled by three key developments: the ability to discover and characterize an adequate number of sufficiently small near-Earth asteroids for capture and return; the ability to implement sufficiently powerful solar electric propulsion systems to enable transportation of the captured NEA; and the proposed human presence in cislunar space in the 2020s enabling exploration and exploitation of the returned NEA. Placing a 500-t asteroid in high lunar orbit would provide a unique, meaningful, and affordable destination for astronaut crews in the next decade. This disruptive capability would have a positive impact on a wide range of the nation’s human space exploration interests. It would provide a high-value target in cislunar space that would require a human presence to take full advantage of this new resource. It would offer an affordable path to providing operational experience with astronauts working around and with a NEA that could feed forward to much longer duration human missions to larger NEAs in deep space. It would provide an affordable path to meeting the nation’s goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth object by 2025. It represents a new synergy between robotic and human missions in which robotic spacecraft retrieve significant quantities of valuable resources for exploitation by astronaut crews to enable human exploration farther out into the solar system. A key example of this is that water or other material extracted from a returned, volatile-rich NEA could be used to provide affordable shielding against galactic cosmic rays. The extracted water could also be used for propellant to transport the shielded habitat. These activities could jump-start an entire in situ resource utilization (ISRU) industry. The availability of a multi-hundred-ton asteroid in lunar orbit could also stimulate the expansion of international cooperation in space as agencies work together to determine how to sample and process this raw material. The capture, transportation, examination, and dissection of an entire NEA would provide valuable information for planetary defense activities that may someday have to deflect a much larger near-Earth object. Finally, placing a NEA in lunar orbit would provide a new capability for human exploration not seen since Apollo. Such an achievement has the potential to inspire a nation. It would be mankind’s first attempt at modifying the heavens to enable the permanent settlement of humans in space. The report that follows outlines the observation campaign necessary to discover and characterize NEAs with the right combination of physical and orbital characteristics that make them attractive targets for return. It suggests that with the right ground-based observation campaign approximately five attractive targets per year could be discovered and adequately characterized. The report also provides a conceptual design of a flight system with the capability to rendezvous with a NEA in deep space, perform in situ characterization of the object and subsequently capture it, de-spin it, and transport it to lunar orbit in a total flight time of 6 to 10 years. The transportation capability would be enabled by a ~40-kW solar electric propulsion system with a specific impulse of 3,000 s. Significantly, the entire flight system could be launched to low-Earth orbit on a single Atlas V-class launch vehicle. With an initial mass to low-Earth orbit (IMLEO) of 18,000 kg, the subsequent delivery of a 500-t asteroid to lunar orbit represents a mass amplification factor of about 28-to-1. That is, 28 times the mass launched to LEO would be delivered to high lunar orbit, where it would be energetically in a favorable location to support human exploration beyond cislunar space. Longer flight times, higher power SEP systems, or a target asteroid in a particularly favorable orbit could increase the mass amplification factor from 28-to-1 to 70-to-1 or greater. The NASA GRC COMPASS team estimated the full life-cycle cost of an asteroid capture and return mission at ~$2.6B

Large space structures and systems in the space station era: A bibliography with indexes

Bibliographies and abstracts are listed for 1372 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system between January 1, 1990 and June 30, 1990. Its purpose is to provide helpful information to the researcher, manager, and designer in technology development and mission design according to system, interactive analysis and design, structural and thermal analysis and design, structural concepts and control systems, electronics, advanced materials, assembly concepts, propulsion, and solar power satellite systems