Marrying Social Media Approaches and Space Flight Control: Eight Years at SpaceOps

Three previous SpaceOps papers [1-3] - published in 2010, 2012 (honored by the Conference as a "Best Paper"), and 2014 - have discussed paths to using social media concepts and techniques to enhance space flight controller effectiveness by a) reducing clutter of nonverbal communications (e.g., visual flow with minimal headers and shared content instead of multiple copies), b) moving some voice communication to non-verbal transmission (virtually eliminating "say again" requests because non-verbal comm can be re-read), thus making remaining voice comm easier to focus on, and c) reducing short-term and long-term flight stress on flight control personnel. This paper shows how Marshall Space Flight Center's (MSFC) ISS Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) is realizing the above goals via the Communications Dashboard (CommDash) software suite deployed in 2017 (including enhancements to the Console Log Tool (CoLT) discussed in earlier papers). Two larger-scope benefits spawned by CommDash evolution are also chronicled: a) emergence of an Agile Software Development (ASD) process adapted to the not-always-nimble environment of government projects, and b) the sprouting of a Human Factors Engineering (HF or HFE) community of practice within MSFC's Payload and Mission Operations Division (PMOD)

Sonic Booms in Atmospheric Turbulence (SonicBAT): The Influence of Turbulence on Shaped Sonic Booms

The objectives of the Sonic Booms in Atmospheric Turbulence (SonicBAT) Program were to develop and validate, via research flight experiments under a range of realistic atmospheric conditions, one numeric turbulence model research code and one classic turbulence model research code using traditional N-wave booms in the presence of atmospheric turbulence, and to apply these models to assess the effects of turbulence on the levels of shaped sonic booms predicted from low boom aircraft designs. The SonicBAT program has successfully investigated sonic boom turbulence effects through the execution of flight experiments at two NASA centers, Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) and Kennedy Space Center (KSC), collecting a comprehensive set of acoustic and atmospheric turbulence data that were used to validate the numeric and classic turbulence models developed. The validated codes were incorporated into the PCBoom sonic boom prediction software and used to estimate the effect of turbulence on the levels of shaped sonic booms associated with several low boom aircraft designs. The SonicBAT program was a four year effort that consisted of turbulence model development and refinement throughout the entire period as well as extensive flight test planning that culminated with the two research flight tests being conducted in the second and third years of the program. The SonicBAT team, led by Wyle, includes partners from the Pennsylvania State University, Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream Aerospace, Boeing, Eagle Aeronautics, Technical & Business Systems, and the Laboratory of Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics (France). A number of collaborators, including the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, also participated by supporting the experiments with human and equipment resources at their own expense. Three NASA centers, AFRC, Langley Research Center (LaRC), and KSC were essential to the planning and conduct of the experiments. The experiments involved precision flight of either an F-18A or F-18B executing steady, level passes at supersonic airspeeds in a turbulent atmosphere to create sonic boom signatures that had been distorted by turbulence. The flights spanned a range of atmospheric turbulence conditions at NASA Armstrong and Kennedy in order to provide a variety of conditions for code validations. The SonicBAT experiments at both sites were designed to capture simultaneous F-18A or F-18B onboard flight instrumentation data, high fidelity ground based and airborne acoustic data, surface and upper air meteorological data, and additional meteorological data from ultrasonic anemometers and SODARs to determine the local atmospheric turbulence and boundary layer height

“some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us”: David Mitchell, Russell Hoban, and metafiction after the millennium

This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After clearly mapping a history of Hoban’s philosophical perspectives and Mitchell’s inter-textual genre-impersonation practice, the article assesses the degree to which Mitchell’s metatextual methods indicate a nostalgia for by-gone radical aesthetics rather than reaching for new modes of its own. The article not only proposes several new backdrops against which Mitchell’s novel can be read but also conducts the first in-depth appraisal of Mitchell’s formal linguistic replication of Riddley Walker

Marrying Social Media Approaches and Space Flight Control: Eight Years at SpaceOps

No abstract availabl

Swift follow-up observations of candidate gravitational-wave transient events

We present the first multi-wavelength follow-up observations of two candidate gravitational-wave (GW) transient events recorded by LIGO and Virgo in their 2009-2010 science run. The events were selected with low latency by the network of GW detectors and their candidate sky locations were observed by the Swift observatory. Image transient detection was used to analyze the collected electromagnetic data, which were found to be consistent with background. Off-line analysis of the GW data alone has also established that the selected GW events show no evidence of an astrophysical origin; one of them is consistent with background and the other one was a test, part of a "blind injection challenge". With this work we demonstrate the feasibility of rapid follow-ups of GW transients and establish the sensitivity improvement joint electromagnetic and GW observations could bring. This is a first step toward an electromagnetic follow-up program in the regime of routine detections with the advanced GW instruments expected within this decade. In that regime multi-wavelength observations will play a significant role in completing the astrophysical identification of GW sources. We present the methods and results from this first combined analysis and discuss its implications in terms of sensitivity for the present and future instruments.Comment: Submitted for publication 2012 May 25, accepted 2012 October 25, published 2012 November 21, in ApJS, 203, 28 ( http://stacks.iop.org/0067-0049/203/28 ); 14 pages, 3 figures, 6 tables; LIGO-P1100038; Science summary at http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-S6LVSwift/index.php ; Public access area to figures, tables at https://dcc.ligo.org/cgi-bin/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=p110003

Gravitational Waves From Known Pulsars: Results From The Initial Detector Era

We present the results of searches for gravitational waves from a large selection of pulsars using data from the most recent science runs (S6, VSR2 and VSR4) of the initial generation of interferometric gravitational wave detectors LIGO (Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory) and Virgo. We do not see evidence for gravitational wave emission from any of the targeted sources but produce upper limits on the emission amplitude. We highlight the results from seven young pulsars with large spin-down luminosities. We reach within a factor of five of the canonical spin-down limit for all seven of these, whilst for the Crab and Vela pulsars we further surpass their spin-down limits. We present new or updated limits for 172 other pulsars (including both young and millisecond pulsars). Now that the detectors are undergoing major upgrades, and, for completeness, we bring together all of the most up-to-date results from all pulsars searched for during the operations of the first-generation LIGO, Virgo and GEO600 detectors. This gives a total of 195 pulsars including the most recent results described in this paper.United States National Science FoundationScience and Technology Facilities Council of the United KingdomMax-Planck-SocietyState of Niedersachsen/GermanyAustralian Research CouncilInternational Science Linkages program of the Commonwealth of AustraliaCouncil of Scientific and Industrial Research of IndiaIstituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare of ItalySpanish Ministerio de Economia y CompetitividadConselleria d'Economia Hisenda i Innovacio of the Govern de les Illes BalearsNetherlands Organisation for Scientific ResearchPolish Ministry of Science and Higher EducationFOCUS Programme of Foundation for Polish ScienceRoyal SocietyScottish Funding CouncilScottish Universities Physics AllianceNational Aeronautics and Space AdministrationOTKA of HungaryLyon Institute of Origins (LIO)National Research Foundation of KoreaIndustry CanadaProvince of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and InnovationNational Science and Engineering Research Council CanadaCarnegie TrustLeverhulme TrustDavid and Lucile Packard FoundationResearch CorporationAlfred P. Sloan FoundationAstronom

A First Search for coincident Gravitational Waves and High Energy Neutrinos using LIGO, Virgo and ANTARES data from 2007

We present the results of the first search for gravitational wave bursts associated with high energy neutrinos. Together, these messengers could reveal new, hidden sources that are not observed by conventional photon astronomy, particularly at high energy. Our search uses neutrinos detected by the underwater neutrino telescope ANTARES in its 5 line configuration during the period January - September 2007, which coincided with the fifth and first science runs of LIGO and Virgo, respectively. The LIGO-Virgo data were analysed for candidate gravitational-wave signals coincident in time and direction with the neutrino events. No significant coincident events were observed. We place limits on the density of joint high energy neutrino - gravitational wave emission events in the local universe, and compare them with densities of merger and core-collapse events.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, science summary page at http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-S5LV_ANTARES/index.php. Public access area to figures, tables at https://dcc.ligo.org/cgi-bin/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=p120000

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far