5,211 research outputs found

    Fixed-Base Simulator Studies of the Ability of the Human Pilot to Provide Energy Management Along Abort and Deep-Space Entry Trajectories

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    A simulation study has been made to determine a pilot's ability to control a low L/D vehicle to a desired point on the earth with initial conditions ranging from parabolic orbits to abort conditions along the boost phase of a deep-space mission. The program was conducted to develop procedures which would allow the pilot to perform the energy management functions required while avoiding the high deceleration or skipout region and to determine the information display required to aid the pilot in flying these procedures. The abort conditions studied extend from a region of relatively high flight-path angles at suborbital velocities while leaving the atmosphere to a region between orbital and near-escape velocity outside the atmosphere. The conditions studied included guidance from suborbital and superorbital aborts as well as guidance following return from a deepspace mission. In this paper, the role of the human pilot?s ability to combine safe return abort procedures with guidance procedures has been investigated. The range capability from various abort and entry conditions is also presented

    A comparison of laser based ranging systems for AR/C category 1: Hardware

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    This paper will present some aspects of the effect of inherent laser effects on the performance of CW-Tone modulated and FM-CW laser ranging techniques. It will be shown that performance of these techniques is affected in different ways by inherent laser characteristics and previous comparisons of the techniques should be modified to reflect more realistic conditions. An overall survey of laser ranging will be given to place the CW and FM-CW techniques in perspective. It will be seen that the newly introduced FM-CW laser radar has potentially far superior performance to CW-Tone modulated systems now proposed for use in space rendezvous and capture systems

    A comparison of laser-based ranging systems for AR/C

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    The three most common types of laser target ranging (time-of-flight, tone modulated, and FM-CW) are discussed in terms of principle of operation. The first, time-of-flight, is shown to depend more on the ability of support electronics than the fundamentals of the concept. Examples in the literature are cited to show the remarkably good performance of time-of-flight systems. A system developed in Finland was shown to have an incremental ranging capability of a few millimeters. The system is not only robust; it does not include additions such as reference legs and the like, which are expected, for improvement in performance. Though not immediately obvious, the second technique, tone modulated ranging is somewhat of an extension of the time-of-flight technique. Finally, the FM-CW technique is presented. This is completely different from the tone or time-of-flight techniques, but is a direct translation of the same-named technique used in radar ranging systems

    Patriotism without Patriots?:Perm-36 and Patriotic Legitimation in Russia

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    This article examines the takeover of the Perm-36 GULAG museum as emblematic of the dynamics of patriotic legitimation in Russia. The museum was dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims of Soviet political repression and it grew in popularity into the 2000s, emerging as an opposition platform and target for self-styled patriots who accused it of distorting Soviet history. The regional government soon joined the battle, finally forcing the museum’s takeover and transforming it into a site honoring the GULAG rather than its victims. Drawing on interviews conducted with the museum’s former director and scientific directors in 2015 and extensive local press materials, this analysis of the struggle over Perm-36 demonstrates the significance of patriotism in sustaining the regional government’s attacks even in the absence of federal patronage. The findings thus challenge prevailing understandings of authoritarian regime politics as driven primarily by patronage and power-maximizing elites

    State Intervention and the Family: Problems of Policy

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    Becoming Banal: Incentivizing and Monopolizing the Nation in Post-Soviet Russia

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    While new regimes often seek legitimation by forging banal ties between state and nation (or “banalization”), there have been few attempts to explain how nationalism becomes banal, to account for variations in the process across different types of regimes, or to establish clear criteria for identifying successes or failures in banalization. This article presents an original theoretical framework for understanding banalization as a social and political process involving attempts to either incentivize or monopolize national expression, depending on the type of political regime. Drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted during 2014–2016, a case study of post-Soviet Russia fleshes out the process and outcomes of banalization across different kinds of regimes from the 1990s to the present. It further suggests the value of examining banalization as a regime process in accounting for the ways that the successes or failures of banalization influence their successors’ pursuit of legitimation.</p

    Russia’s Ministry of Ambivalence:The Failure of Civic Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Russia

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    This article argues that the sources of official and societal ambivalence towards civic nationhood in today’s Russia are found in the institutional instability and personalist dynamics of hybrid regime politics in the 1990s. Successful civic nation-building should institutionalize inclusive criteria for citizenship as a basis for policymaking, which in turn should create incentives for dominant ethnicities to embrace civic nationhood. While the shifting views of Boris Yel’tsin on nationalities policy and the constant turmoil in the government’s nationalities ministry have received little scholarly attention, they illuminate the endogenous sources of regime instability in relation to civic nation-building. Russia’s experience thus challenges the traditional view of ethnic nationalism as fostering authoritarianism and civic nationalism as fostering democracy: rather, competitive authoritarianism in the 1990s confounded the regime’s own efforts toward civic nation-building and laid the groundwork for the “ethnic turn” in Russian politics under Vladimir Putin.</p

    A Phase Space Approach to Gravitational Enropy

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    We examine the definition S = ln Omega as a candidate "gravitational entropy" function. We calculate its behavior for gravitationl and density perturbations in closed, open and flat cosmologies and find that in all cases it increases monotonically. Using the formalism to calculate the gravitational entropy produced during inflation gives the canonical answer. We compare the behavior of S with the behavior of the square of the Weyl tensor. Applying the formalism to black holes has proven more problematical.Comment: Talk delivered at South African Relativistic Cosmology Symposium, Feb 1999. Some new results over Rothman and Anninos 97. To appear in GRG, 17 page
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