TDRSS S-shuttle unique receiver equipment

Beginning with STS-9, the Tracking and Date Relay Satellite system (TDRSS) will start providing S- and Ku-band communications and tracking support to the Space Shuttle and its payloads. The most significant element of this support takes place at the TDRSS White Sands Ground Terminal, which processes the Shuttle return link S- and Ku-band signals. While Ku-band hardware available to other TDRSS users is also applied to Ku-Shuttle, stringent S-Shuttle link margins have precluded the application of the standard TDRSS S-band processing equipment to S-Shuttle. It was therfore found necessary to develop a unique S-Shuttle Receiver that embodies state-of-the-art digital technology and processing techniques. This receiver, developed by Motorola, Inc., enhances link margins by 1.5 dB relative to the standard S-band equipment and its bit error rate performance is within a few tenths of a dB of theory. An overview description of the Space Shuttle Receiver Equipment (SSRE) is presented which includes the presentation of block diagrams and salient design features. Selected, measured performance results are also presented

Nonmetallic impurities improve mechanical properties of vapor-deposited tungsten

Mechanical properties of vapor deposited tungsten are improved by selective incorporation of various nonmetallic impurities. Addition of trace quantities of carbon, nitrogen, or oxygen can significantly increase both low and high temperature yield strength without greatly affecting ductile-to-brittle transition temperature

Hawking-Moss bounces and vacuum decay rates

The conventional interpretation of the Hawking-Moss (HM) solution implies a transition rate between vacua that depends only on the values of the potential in the initial vacuum and at the top of a potential barrier, leading to the implausible conclusion that transitions to distant vacua can be as likely as those to a nearby one. I analyze this issue using a nongravitational example with analogous properties. I show that such HM bounce do not give reliable rate calculations, but are instead related to the probability of finding a quasistable configuration at a local potential maximum.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; title changed, clarifications in text, typos corrected, references added; version to appear in journa

The resultant parameters of effective theory

This is the 4-th paper in the series devoted to a systematic study of the problem of mathematically correct formulation of the rules needed to manage an effective field theory. Here we consider the problem of constructing the full set of essential parameters in the case of the most general effective scattering theory containing no massless particles with spin J > 1/2. We perform the detailed classification of combinations of the Hamiltonian coupling constants and select those which appear in the expressions for renormalized S-matrix elements at a given loop order.Comment: 21 pages, 4 LaTeX figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Effects of additions of nonmetallics on the properties of vapor-deposited tungsten

Nonmetallic additive effects on properties of vapor deposited tungste

Papapetrou Energy-Momentum Tensor for Chern-Simons Modified Gravity

We construct a conserved, symmetric energy-momentum (pseudo-)tensor for Chern-Simons modified gravity, thus demonstrating that the theory is Lorentz invariant. The tensor is discussed in relation to other gravitational energy-momentum tensors and analyzed for the Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstrom, and FRW solutions. To our knowledge this is the first confirmation that the Reissner-Nordstrom and FRW metrics are solutions of the modified theory.Comment: 8 pages; typos corrected, references fixed, some calculations shortene

Vacuum decay and internal symmetries

We study the effects of internal symmetries on the decay by bubble nucleation of a metastable false vacuum. The zero modes about the bounce solution that are associated with the breaking of continuous internal symmetries result in an enhancement of the tunneling rate into vacua in which some of the symmetries of the initial state are spontaneously broken. We develop a general formalism for evaluating the effects of these zero modes on the bubble nucleation rate in both flat and curved space-times.Comment: LaTex, 11 pages, No figures, one minor chang

Novel applications of the NASA/GSFC Viterbi decoder hardware simulator

The NASA/GSFC developed an all digital, real time, programmable Viterbi decoder simulator operating at rates up to 6 Msps. With this simulator, the bit error rate (BER) performance of convolutionally encoded/Viterbi decoded Shuttle-TDRSS return link channels under pulsed radio frequency interference (RFI) conditions has been predicted. The principles of the simulator are described with special emphasis on the channel simulator and the essential interaction between CLASS software and the simulator. The sensitivity of coded BER as function of several illustrative RFI parameters is discussed for two typical Shuttle-TDRSS return link configurations

Aspects of Nucleon Chiral Perturbation Theory

I review recent progress made in the calculation of nucleon properties in the framework of heavy baryon CHPT. Topics include: Compton scattering, $\pi N$ scattering, the anatomy of a low-energy constant and the induced pseudoscalar form factor.Comment: plain TeX (macro included), 12pp, lecture delivered at the workshop on "Chiral Dynamics: Theory and Experiments", MIT, July 25-29, 199