Paper Session III-C - Pegasus - History of the First Successful Air-Launched Space Vehicle

Just a few minutes after noon on April 5th, 1990, a rocket took off into the sky and changed how America perceived small space launch vehicles. The initial flight of Pegasus, dropped from a B-52B aircraft flown from Edwards Air Force Base was a success. Since that time Pegasus has conducted 31 missions, launching more than 70 satellites for government and commercial customers and has flown from 7 different “launch” sites using 5 different Ranges. This paper will document the history of Pegasus. It will be a historic look into the need that prompted Orbital Sciences Corporation to investigate small space launch vehicles and will cover the concept behind Pegasus and the major technical trades and market forces that changed its course of design. The paper will show how customer inputs into the operational requirements for small satellite launching resulted in capabilities inherent in the current Pegasus XL launch vehicle and Orbital’s L-1011 Orbital Carrier Aircraft. It will also briefly cover how Pegasus has been modified to support other classes of missions by using it as the basis for several derivative launch vehicles – the Taurus launch vehicle, the Orbital/Suborbital Program Space Launch Vehicle

Small Launch Vehicles – A 2015 State of the Industry Survey

The first half of the 2010’s has seen a dramatic increase in potential small launch vehicle contenders, defined as rockets capable of carrying at most 1000 kg to Low Earth Orbit. Spurred on by government programs such as FALCON, SALVO, RASCAL, SWORDS, NEXT, and VCLS and the rapid proliferation of CubeSats and nanosatellites, more than 15 different commercial, semi-commercial, and government entities worldwide are now working on new entrants of this class. This paper presents an overview of all of the small satellite launch systems under development today We will compare capabilities, stated mission goals, and cost and funding sources where available. We purposely avoid making any judgements on vehicle maturity as we do not have personal insight into the design and development of many of these new entrants. The nature of this survey limited us to publically available information – whether on the web, social media, traditional media, or published papers. The authors welcome any comments, feedback, or corrections

Solar Polar Explorer Enabling Launch Technology

To unlock mysteries of our sun, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and its propulsion system partner Northrop Grumman confronted the challenge of getting sensors to the sun for detailed observation on a limited budget. SwRI’s proposed Solaris mission paired a solar observatory with the Orion 38 and Orion 50 XLT Solid Rocket Motor (SRM)-based stages for a gravity-assisted slingshot maneuver around Jupiter. The NASA Heliophysics Medium Explorer (MIDEX) program selected Solaris in 2020 for a concept study that ran through 2022. Solaris aimed to conduct high-latitude observations of the Sun’s south and north regions to resolve our understanding of how their magnetic fields and flows effect the broader solar cycle. Solaris carried two primary sensors: a Compact Doppler Magnetograph (CDM); and a wide-field Solaris Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (S-EUVI). The proposal conformed to cost and launch vehicle parameters: a $250 million MIDEX mission cost cap and integration with one of three Designated Reference Launch Vehicles (DRLVs). The launch vehicle did not count toward the mission cost but the velocity-boosting upper stage motors did. The cost and technical tradeoffs resulting in Solaris being paired with the Orion 38 and Orion 50 XLT SRM-based stages are likely relevant to other cost-capped deep space missions

Altered functional connectivity during speech perception in Congenital Amusia

Individuals with congenital amusia have a lifelong history of unreliable pitch processing. Accordingly, they downweight pitch cues during speech perception and instead rely on other dimensions such as duration. We investigated the neural basis for this strategy. During fMRI, individuals with amusia (N=15) and controls (N=15) read sentences where a comma indicated a grammatical phrase boundary. They then heard two sentences spoken that differed only in pitch and/or duration cues, and selected the best match for the written sentence. Prominent reductions in functional connectivity were detected in the amusia group, between left prefrontal language-related regions and right hemisphere pitch-related regions, which reflected the between-group differences in cue weights in the same groups of listeners. Connectivity differences between these regions were not present during a control task. Our results indicate that the reliability of perceptual dimensions is linked with functional connectivity between frontal and perceptual regions, and suggest a compensatory mechanism

The pipeline project:Pre-publication independent replications of a single laboratory's research pipeline

This crowdsourced project introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research, in which findings are replicated in qualified independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. Our goal is to establish a non-adversarial replication process with highly informative final results. To illustrate the Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) approach, 25 research groups conducted replications of all ten moral judgment effects which the last author and his collaborators had "in the pipeline" as of August 2014. Six findings replicated according to all replication criteria, one finding replicated but with a significantly smaller effect size than the original, one finding replicated consistently in the original culture but not outside of it, and two findings failed to find support. In total, 40% of the original findings failed at least one major replication criterion. Potential ways to implement and incentivize pre-publication independent replication on a large scale are discussed. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.</p

Relevance of Stress and Female Sex Hormones for Emotion and Cognition

There are clear sex differences in incidence and onset of stress-related and other psychiatric disorders in humans. Yet, rodent models for psychiatric disorders are predominantly based on male animals. The strongest argument for not using female rodents is their estrous cycle and the fluctuating sex hormones per phase which multiplies the number of animals to be tested. Here, we will discuss studies focused on sex differences in emotionality and cognitive abilities in experimental conditions with and without stress. First, female sex hormones such as estrogens and progesterone affect emotions and cognition, contributing to sex differences in behavior. Second, females respond differently to stress than males which might be related to the phase of the estrous cycle. For example, female rats and mice express less anxiety than males in a novel environment. Proestrus females are less anxious than females in the other estrous phases. Third, males perform in spatial tasks superior to females. However, while stress impairs spatial memory in males, females improve their spatial abilities, depending on the task and kind of stressor. We conclude that the differences in emotion, cognition and responses to stress between males and females over the different phases of the estrous cycle should be used in animal models for stress-related psychiatric disorders