Data catalog series for space science and applications flight missions. Volume 4A: Descriptions of meteorological and terrestrial applications spacecraft and investigations

The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) provides data from and information about space science and applications flight investigations in support of additional studies beyond those performed as the principal part of any flight mission. The Earth-orbiting spacecraft for investigations of the earth and its atmosphere is discussed. Geodetic tracking data are included in this category. The principal subject areas presented are meteorology and earth resources survey, and the spacecraft selection is made according to those subjects. All experiments on board the spacecraft are described. No attempt is made to reference investigations that are related to the above disciplines, but that are described in other volumes of this series

Novel wind sensor for robotic chemical plume tracking

Copyright © 2006 IEEEWind sensors are widely used to measure wind speed and direction for weather forecasting or for other purposes including measuring wind flow of wind tunnel in a laboratory. Due to its wide applications, many wind sensors are commercially available off-the-shelf. This study concerns wind direction and speed sensing for robotic chemical plume tracking studies and applications. Therefore, it is highly demanded to have a wind sensor that has a small size, light weight and less power consumption. In this paper, the design of the wind sensor down to the post-processing of the sensor reading data are presented. The result shows that the wind sensor performance is satisfactory and can be implemented for robotic chemical plume tracking study to provide proper wind speed and direction information.Tien-Fu Lu and Chee Liang N

Visualization of leading edge vortices on a series of flat plate delta wings

A summary of flow visualization data obtained as part of NASA Grant NAG2-258 is presented. During the course of this study, many still and high speed motion pictures were taken of the leading edge vortices on a series of flat plate delta wings at varying angles of attack. The purpose is to present a systematic collection of photographs showing the state of vortices as a function of the angle of attack for the four models tested

Size-selective optical forces for microspheres using evanescent wave excitation of whispering gallery modes

We show that when a microsphere is illuminated by an evanescent wave, the optical forces on- and off- whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonance can differ by several orders of magnitude. Such size selective force allows one to selectively manipulate the resonating particles, while leaving those particles at off-resonance untouched. As WGM resonances have very high-Q's, this kind of force could be deployed for size-selective manipulation with a very high accuracy (~1/Q), as well as simultaneous particle-sorting according to their size or resonant frequency.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure