9,295 research outputs found
Spitzer Warm Mission Transition and Operations
Following the successful dynamic planning and implementation of IRAC Warm Instrument Characterization activities, transition to Spitzer Warm Mission operations has gone smoothly. Operation teams procedures and processes required minimal adaptation and the overall composition of the Mission Operation System retained the same functionality it had during the Cryogenic Mission. While the warm mission scheduling has been simplified because all observations are now being made with a single instrument, several other differences have increased the complexity. The bulk of the observations executed to date have been from ten large Exploration Science programs that, combined, have more complex constraints, more observing requests, and more exo-planet observations with durations of up to 145 hours. Communication with the observatory is also becoming more challenging as the Spitzer DSN antenna allocations have been reduced from two tracking passes per day to a single pass impacting both uplink and downlink activities. While IRAC is now operating with only two channels, the data collection rate is roughly 60% of the four-channel rate leaving a somewhat higher average volume collected between the less frequent passes. Also, the maximum downlink data rate is decreasing as the distance to Spitzer increases requiring longer passes. Nevertheless, with well over 90% of the time spent on science observations, efficiency has equaled or exceeded that achieved during the cryogenic mission
An Overview of the 2014 ALMA Long Baseline Campaign
A major goal of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is to
make accurate images with resolutions of tens of milliarcseconds, which at
submillimeter (submm) wavelengths requires baselines up to ~15 km. To develop
and test this capability, a Long Baseline Campaign (LBC) was carried out from
September to late November 2014, culminating in end-to-end observations,
calibrations, and imaging of selected Science Verification (SV) targets. This
paper presents an overview of the campaign and its main results, including an
investigation of the short-term coherence properties and systematic phase
errors over the long baselines at the ALMA site, a summary of the SV targets
and observations, and recommendations for science observing strategies at long
baselines. Deep ALMA images of the quasar 3C138 at 97 and 241 GHz are also
compared to VLA 43 GHz results, demonstrating an agreement at a level of a few
percent. As a result of the extensive program of LBC testing, the highly
successful SV imaging at long baselines achieved angular resolutions as fine as
19 mas at ~350 GHz. Observing with ALMA on baselines of up to 15 km is now
possible, and opens up new parameter space for submm astronomy.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in the
Astrophysical Journal Letters; this version with small changes to
affiliation
Subsurface sounders
Airborne or spaceborne electromagnetic systems used to detect subsurface features are discussed. Data are given as a function of resistivity of ground material, magnetic permeability of free space, and angular frequency. It was noted that resistivities vary with the water content and temperature
Accurate detection of moving targets via random sensor arrays and Kerdock codes
The detection and parameter estimation of moving targets is one of the most
important tasks in radar. Arrays of randomly distributed antennas have been
popular for this purpose for about half a century. Yet, surprisingly little
rigorous mathematical theory exists for random arrays that addresses
fundamental question such as how many targets can be recovered, at what
resolution, at which noise level, and with which algorithm. In a different line
of research in radar, mathematicians and engineers have invested significant
effort into the design of radar transmission waveforms which satisfy various
desirable properties. In this paper we bring these two seemingly unrelated
areas together. Using tools from compressive sensing we derive a theoretical
framework for the recovery of targets in the azimuth-range-Doppler domain via
random antennas arrays. In one manifestation of our theory we use Kerdock codes
as transmission waveforms and exploit some of their peculiar properties in our
analysis. Our paper provides two main contributions: (i) We derive the first
rigorous mathematical theory for the detection of moving targets using random
sensor arrays. (ii) The transmitted waveforms satisfy a variety of properties
that are very desirable and important from a practical viewpoint. Thus our
approach does not just lead to useful theoretical insights, but is also of
practical importance. Various extensions of our results are derived and
numerical simulations confirming our theory are presented
Computational polarimetric microwave imaging
We propose a polarimetric microwave imaging technique that exploits recent
advances in computational imaging. We utilize a frequency-diverse cavity-backed
metasurface, allowing us to demonstrate high-resolution polarimetric imaging
using a single transceiver and frequency sweep over the operational microwave
bandwidth. The frequency-diverse metasurface imager greatly simplifies the
system architecture compared with active arrays and other conventional
microwave imaging approaches. We further develop the theoretical framework for
computational polarimetric imaging and validate the approach experimentally
using a multi-modal leaky cavity. The scalar approximation for the interaction
between the radiated waves and the target---often applied in microwave
computational imaging schemes---is thus extended to retrieve the susceptibility
tensors, and hence providing additional information about the targets.
Computational polarimetry has relevance for existing systems in the field that
extract polarimetric imagery, and particular for ground observation. A growing
number of short-range microwave imaging applications can also notably benefit
from computational polarimetry, particularly for imaging objects that are
difficult to reconstruct when assuming scalar estimations.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure
- …