Isinglass River Conservation Corridor Project

The New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP) provided a $9,075 grant to Bear-Paw Regional Greenways to support the Isinglass River Conservation Corridor Project. The grant helped fund some of the transaction costs associated with the project that protected high-value conservation land along the Isinglass River and in other areas of the watershed in Strafford, New Hampshire. The$2.9 million project was a collaboration of Bear-Paw, the Trust for Public Land (TPL), and the Town of Strafford that protected five properties and 868 acres of forest, over one mile of road frontage, more than three miles of frontage on streams and rivers (including more than 1½ miles on the Isinglass River), several ponds, and two historic mill sites. All of these properties are in areas that have been identified as important to protect in the Land Conservation Plan for New Hampshire’s Coastal Watersheds, a Conservation Plan produced by Bear-Paw Regional Greenways, the New Hampshire Wildlife Action Plan

AN EXTENSION OF THE CHAPMAN-FERRARO THEORY OF GEOMAGNETIC STORMS

Extension of chapman-ferraro theory of geomagnetic storm

Bread board float zone experiment system for high purity silicon

A breadboard float zone experimental system has been established at Westech Systems for use by NASA in the float zone experimental area. A used zoner of suitable size and flexibility was acquired and installed with the necessary utilities. Repairs, alignments and modifications were made to provide for dislocation free zoning of silicon. The zoner is capable of studying process parameters used in growing silicon in gravity and is flexible to allow trying of new features that will test concepts of zoning in microgravity. Characterizing the state of the art molten zones of a growing silicon crystal will establish the data base against which improvements of zoning in gravity or growing in microgravity can be compared. 25 mm diameter was chosen as the reference size, since growth in microgravity will be at that diameter or smaller for about the next 6 years. Dislocation free crystals were growtn in the 100 and 111 orientations, using a wide set of growth conditions. The zone shape at one set of conditions was measured, by simultaneously aluminum doping and freezing the zone, lengthwise slabbing and delineating by etching. The whole set of crystals, grown under various conditions, were slabbed, polished and striation etched, revealing the growth interface shape and the periodic and aperiodic natures of the striations

Astrophotonic micro-spectrographs in the era of ELTs

The next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT), with diameters up to 39 meters, will start opera- tion in the next decade and promises new challenges in the development of instruments. The growing field of astrophotonics (the use of photonic technologies in astronomy) can partly solve this problem by allowing mass production of fully integrated and robust instruments combining various optical functions, with the potential to reduce the size, complexity and cost of instruments. In this paper, we focus on developments in integrated micro-spectrographs and their potential for ELTs. We take an inventory of the identified technologies currently in development, and compare the performance of the different concepts. We show that in the current context of single-mode instruments, integrated spectrographs making use of, e.g., a photonic lantern can be a solution to reach the desired performance. However, in the longer term, there is a clear need to develop multimode devices to improve overall the throughput and sensitivity, while decreasing the instrument complexity.Comment: 9 pages. 2 figures. Proceeding of SPIE 9147 "Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V

Space-time domain decomposition for advection-diffusion problems in mixed formulations

This paper is concerned with the numerical solution of porous-media flow and transport problems , i. e. heterogeneous, advection-diffusion problems. Its aim is to investigate numerical schemes for these problems in which different time steps can be used in different parts of the domain. Global-in-time, non-overlapping domain-decomposition methods are coupled with operator splitting making possible the different treatment of the advection and diffusion terms. Two domain-decomposition methods are considered: one uses the time-dependent Steklov--Poincar{\'e} operator and the other uses optimized Schwarz waveform relaxation (OSWR) based on Robin transmission conditions. For each method, a mixed formulation of an interface problem on the space-time interface is derived, and different time grids are employed to adapt to different time scales in the subdomains. A generalized Neumann-Neumann preconditioner is proposed for the first method. To illustrate the two methods numerical results for two-dimensional problems with strong heterogeneities are presented. These include both academic problems and more realistic prototypes for simulations for the underground storage of nuclear waste

A quantitative image evaluation study of a concurrent photon amplification treated emulsion

A study was performed to evaluate the effect of concurrent photon amplification (CPA) on Kodak Tri-X Pan emulsion in regard to image quality. The study evaluated detective quantum efficiency (DQE), modulation transfer function (MTF), and information content (IC) as a function of exposure in a comparison between normal exposure and CPA. The results showed CPA to enhance image quality relative to normal exposure at very low exposure levels. As the exposure was increased, normally exposed images became comparable and then exceeded CPA exposures in image quality. The exposure level at which normal exposure became preferential was distinct with each image quality measure

Effects of simplifying assumptions on optimal trajectory estimation for a high-performance aircraft

When analyzing the performance of an aircraft, certain simplifying assumptions, which decrease the complexity of the problem, can often be made. The degree of accuracy required in the solution may determine the extent to which these simplifying assumptions are incorporated. A complex model may yield more accurate results if it describes the real situation more thoroughly. However, a complex model usually involves more computation time, makes the analysis more difficult, and often requires more information to do the analysis. Therefore, to choose the simplifying assumptions intelligently, it is important to know what effects the assumptions may have on the calculated performance of a vehicle. Several simplifying assumptions are examined, the effects of simplified models to those of the more complex ones are compared, and conclusions are drawn about the impact of these assumptions on flight envelope generation and optimal trajectory calculation. Models which affect an aircraft are analyzed, but the implications of simplifying the model of the aircraft itself are not studied. The examples are atmospheric models, gravitational models, different models for equations of motion, and constraint conditions