Spaceborne Imaging Radar Symposium

An overview of the present state of the art in the different scientific and technological fields related to spaceborne imaging radars was presented. The data acquired with the SEASAT SAR (1978) and Shuttle Imaging Radar, SIR-A (1981) clearly demonstrated the important emphasis in the 80's is going to be on in-depth research investigations conducted with the more flexible and sophisticated SIR series instruments and on long term monitoring of geophysical phenomena conducted from free-flying platforms such as ERS-1 and RADARSAT

Conceptual design study for an advanced cab and visual system, volume 2

The performance, design, construction and testing requirements are defined for developing an advanced cab and visual system. The rotorcraft system integration simulator is composed of the advanced cab and visual system and the rotorcraft system motion generator, and is part of an existing simulation facility. User's applications for the simulator include rotorcraft design development, product improvement, threat assessment, and accident investigation

Gloved Human-Machine Interface

Certain exemplary embodiments can provide a system, machine, device, manufacture, circuit, composition of matter, and/or user interface adapted for and/or resulting from, and/or a method and/or machine-readable medium comprising machine-implementable instructions for, activities that can comprise and/or relate to: tracking movement of a gloved hand of a human; interpreting a gloved finger movement of the human; and/or in response to interpreting the gloved finger movement, providing feedback to the human

Mars Observer Camera

The Mars Observer camera (MOC) is a three-component system (one narrow-angle and two wide-angle cameras) designed to take high spatial resolution pictures of the surface of Mars and to obtain lower spatial resolution, synoptic coverage of the planet's surface and atmosphere. The cameras are based on the “push broom” technique; that is, they do not take “frames” but rather build pictures, one line at a time, as the spacecraft moves around the planet in its orbit. MOC is primarily a telescope for taking extremely high resolution pictures of selected locations on Mars. Using the narrow-angle camera, areas ranging from 2.8 km × 2.8 km to 2.8 km × 25.2 km (depending on available internal digital buffer memory) can be photographed at about 1.4 m/pixel. Additionally, lower-resolution pictures (to a lowest resolution of about 11 m/pixel) can be acquired by pixel averaging; these images can be much longer, ranging up to 2.8 × 500 km at 11 m/pixel. High-resolution data will be used to study sediments and sedimentary processes, polar processes and deposits, volcanism, and other geologic/geomorphic processes. The MOC wide-angle cameras are capable of viewing Mars from horizon to horizon and are designed for low-resolution global and intermediate resolution regional studies. Low-resolution observations can be made every orbit, so that in a single 24-hour period a complete global picture of the planet can be assembled at a resolution of at least 7.5 km/pixel. Regional areas (covering hundreds of kilometers on a side) may be photographed at a resolution of better than 250 m/pixel at the nadir. Such images will be particularly useful in studying time-variable features such as lee clouds, the polar cap edge, and wind streaks, as well as acquiring stereoscopic coverage of areas of geological interest. The limb can be imaged at a vertical and along-track resolution of better than 1.5 km. Different color filters within the two wide-angle cameras permit color images of the surface and atmosphere to be made to distinguish between clouds and the ground and between clouds of different composition

Mars Observer Camera

The Mars Observer camera (MOC) is a three-component system (one narrow-angle and two wide-angle cameras) designed to take high spatial resolution pictures of the surface of Mars and to obtain lower spatial resolution, synoptic coverage of the planet's surface and atmosphere. The cameras are based on the “push broom” technique; that is, they do not take “frames” but rather build pictures, one line at a time, as the spacecraft moves around the planet in its orbit. MOC is primarily a telescope for taking extremely high resolution pictures of selected locations on Mars. Using the narrow-angle camera, areas ranging from 2.8 km × 2.8 km to 2.8 km × 25.2 km (depending on available internal digital buffer memory) can be photographed at about 1.4 m/pixel. Additionally, lower-resolution pictures (to a lowest resolution of about 11 m/pixel) can be acquired by pixel averaging; these images can be much longer, ranging up to 2.8 × 500 km at 11 m/pixel. High-resolution data will be used to study sediments and sedimentary processes, polar processes and deposits, volcanism, and other geologic/geomorphic processes. The MOC wide-angle cameras are capable of viewing Mars from horizon to horizon and are designed for low-resolution global and intermediate resolution regional studies. Low-resolution observations can be made every orbit, so that in a single 24-hour period a complete global picture of the planet can be assembled at a resolution of at least 7.5 km/pixel. Regional areas (covering hundreds of kilometers on a side) may be photographed at a resolution of better than 250 m/pixel at the nadir. Such images will be particularly useful in studying time-variable features such as lee clouds, the polar cap edge, and wind streaks, as well as acquiring stereoscopic coverage of areas of geological interest. The limb can be imaged at a vertical and along-track resolution of better than 1.5 km. Different color filters within the two wide-angle cameras permit color images of the surface and atmosphere to be made to distinguish between clouds and the ground and between clouds of different composition

Beyond visualization : designing interfaces to contextualize geospatial data

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-74).The growing sensor data collections about our environment have the potential to drastically change our perception of the fragile world we live in. To make sense of such data, we commonly use visualization techniques, enabling public discourse and analysis. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a series of interactive systems that integrate geospatial sensor data visualization and terrain models with various user interface modalities in an educational context to support data analysis and knowledge building using part-digital, part-physical rendering. The main contribution of this thesis is a concrete application scenario and initial prototype of a "Designed Environment" where we can explore the relationship between the surface of Japan's islands, the tension that originates in the fault lines along the seafloor beneath its east coast, and the resulting natural disasters. The system is able to import geospatial data from a multitude of sources on the "Spatial Web", bringing us one step closer to a tangible "dashboard of the Earth."Samuel Luescher.S.M

Power Modeling and Optimization for GPGPUs

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) supports tens of thousands of parallel threads and delivers remarkably high computing throughput. General-Purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPUs) is becoming the attractive platform for general-purpose applications that request high computational performance such as scientific computing, financial applications, medical data processing, and so on. However, GPGPUs is facing severe power challenge due to the increasing number of cores placed on a single chip with decreasing feature size. In order to explore the power optimization techniques in GPGPUs, I first build a power model for GPGPUs, which is able to estimate both dynamic and leakage power of major microarchitecture structures in GPGPUs. I then target on the power-hungry structures (e.g. register file) to explore the energy-efficient GPGPUs. In order to hide the long latency operations, GPGPUs employs the fine-grained multi-threading among numerous active threads, leading to the sizeable register files with massive power consumption. The conventional method to reduce dynamic power consumption is the supply voltage scaling. And the inter-bank tunneling FETs (TFETs) is the promising candidate compared to CMOS for low voltage operations regarding to both leakage and performance. However, always executing at the low voltage will result in significant performance degradation. In this study, I propose the hybrid CMOS-TFET based register file and allocate TFET-based registers to threads whose execution progress can be delayed to some degree to avoid the memory contentions with other threads to reduce both dynamic and leakage power, and the CMOS-based registers are still used for threads requiring normal execution speed. My experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves 30% energy (including both dynamic and leakage) reduction in register files with negligible performance degradation compared to the baseline case equipped with naive power optimization technique