Identification and control of structures in space

The derivation of the equations of motion for the Spacecraft Control Laboratory Experiment (SCOLE) is reported and the equations of motion of a similar structure orbiting the earth are also derived. The structure is assumed to undergo large rigid-body maneuvers and small elastic deformations. A perturbation approach is proposed whereby the quantities defining the rigid-body maneuver are assumed to be relatively large, with the elastic deformations and deviations from the rigid-body maneuver being relatively small. The perturbation equations have the form of linear equations with time-dependent coefficients. An active control technique can then be formulated to permit maneuvering of the spacecraft and simultaneously suppressing the elastic vibration

Are the hosts of VLBI selected radio-AGN different to those of radio-loud AGN?

Recent studies have found that radio-AGN selected by radio-loudness show little difference in terms of their host galaxy properties when compared to non-AGN galaxies of similar stellar mass and redshift. Using new 1.4~GHz VLBI observations of the COSMOS field we find that approximately 49$\pm8$\% of high-mass (M $>$ 10$^{10.5}$ M$_{\odot}$), high luminosity (L$_{1.4}$ $>$ 10$^{24}$ W~Hz$^{-1}$) radio-AGN possess a VLBI detected counterpart. These objects show no discernible bias towards specific stellar masses, redshifts or host properties other than what is shown by the radio-AGN population in general. Radio-AGN that are detected in VLBI observations are not special, but form a representative sample of the radio-loud AGN population.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, lette

Compact Radio Cores in Seyfert Galaxies

We have observed a sample of 157 Seyfert galaxies with a 275 km baseline radio interferometer to search for compact, high brightness temperature radio emission from the active nucleus. We obtain the surprising result that compact radio cores are much more common in Seyfert 2 than in Seyfert 1 galaxies, which at first seems to be inconsistent with orientation unification schemes. We propose a model, involving optical depth effects in the narrow-line region, which can reconcile our result with the standard unified scheme. (Accepted for publication in ApJ 1994 Sep 10)Comment: 21 pages and 7 figures, uuencoded tar-compressed postscript files, ATP18

GRB Spikes Could Resolve Stars

GRBs vary more rapidly than any other known cosmological phenomena. The lower limits of this variability have not yet been explored. Improvements in detectors would reveal or limit the actual rate of short GRBs. Were microsecond "spike" GRBs to exist and be detectable, they would time-resolve stellar mass objects throughout the universe by their gravitational microlensing effect. Analyzing the time structure of sufficient numbers of GRB spikes would reveal or limit $\Omega_{star}$, $\Omega_{MACHO}$, and/or $\Omega_{baryon}$.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, in press: ApJ (Letters

Orbital flight effects on calcium kinetics and fracture healing Final report

Orbital flight effects on calcium kinetics and fracture healin

Techniques development for whale migration tracking

Effort leading to the completion of development and fabrication of expansible whale harnesses and whale-carried instrument pods is described, along with details of the gear. Early preparative effort for a January-February 1974 field expedition is reported

The Vascular Flora of Clay Prairie State Preserve (Butler County, Iowa): Recommendations to the Iowa State Preserve System

Clay Prairie State Preserve (1.2 ha) is an upland prairie located in Butler County, IA, and represents one of the last remnants of black-soil tallgrass prairie in northeast Iowa. An annotated checklist of the vascular flora of Clay Prairie is presented here, based on a previously published flora of the preserve and recent field work conducted by the authors between 1997 to 2001, and 2008 to 2011. The preserve contains a diverse vascular flora representing 50 families, 145 genera and 214 taxa (174 native to Iowa). In comparison with 26 larger prairies (4 to 121 ha) protected in the Iowa state preserves system, the Clay Prairie flora ranks 10th in total number of native Iowa prairie plant taxa (135 taxa) and 10th in total number of native Iowa prairie plant taxa assigned high (7 to 10) values of the Iowa Conservation Coefficient (55 taxa). As a remnant of formerly much more extensive tallgrass prairie in Iowa, Clay Prairie protects individual plant taxa, plant assemblages, and ecological and evolutionary processes, while providing opportunities for people to experience native prairie. The floristic comparisons presented in this paper suggest that the floras of many other prairies protected in the Iowa State Preserves system are not thoroughly documented. Hence, we recommend that floristic studies of these other prairie preserves be undertaken to include documentation of the entire flora by voucher specimens. We also encourage site managers of prairies in the Iowa State Preserves system to prepare annual reports summarizing management and educational activities that occur in these preserves

COLA. III. Radio Detection of Active Galactic Nucleus in Compact Moderate Luminosity Infrared Galaxies

We present results from 4.8 GHz Very Large Array (VLA) and global very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations of the northern half of the moderate FIR luminosity (median L_(IR) = 10^(11.01) L_☉) COLA sample of star-forming galaxies. VLBI sources are detected in a high fraction (20/90) of the galaxies observed. The radio luminosities of these cores (~10^(21) W Hz^(–1)) are too large to be explained by radio supernovae or supernova remnants and we argue that they are instead powered by active galactic nuclei (AGNs). These sub-parsec scale radio cores are preferentially detected toward galaxies whose VLA maps show bright 100-500 parsec scale nuclear radio components. Since these latter structures tightly follow the FIR to radio-continuum correlation for star formation, we conclude that the AGN-powered VLBI sources are associated with compact nuclear starburst environments. The implications for possible starburst-AGN connections are discussed. The detected VLBI sources have a relatively narrow range of radio luminosity consistent with models in which intense compact Eddington-limited starbursts regulate the gas supply onto a central supermassive black hole. The high incidence of AGN radio cores in compact starbursts suggests little or no delay between the starburst phase and the onset of AGN activity

Radio Galaxy Zoo: Knowledge Transfer Using Rotationally Invariant Self-Organising Maps

With the advent of large scale surveys the manual analysis and classification of individual radio source morphologies is rendered impossible as existing approaches do not scale. The analysis of complex morphological features in the spatial domain is a particularly important task. Here we discuss the challenges of transferring crowdsourced labels obtained from the Radio Galaxy Zoo project and introduce a proper transfer mechanism via quantile random forest regression. By using parallelized rotation and flipping invariant Kohonen-maps, image cubes of Radio Galaxy Zoo selected galaxies formed from the FIRST radio continuum and WISE infrared all sky surveys are first projected down to a two-dimensional embedding in an unsupervised way. This embedding can be seen as a discretised space of shapes with the coordinates reflecting morphological features as expressed by the automatically derived prototypes. We find that these prototypes have reconstructed physically meaningful processes across two channel images at radio and infrared wavelengths in an unsupervised manner. In the second step, images are compared with those prototypes to create a heat-map, which is the morphological fingerprint of each object and the basis for transferring the user generated labels. These heat-maps have reduced the feature space by a factor of 248 and are able to be used as the basis for subsequent ML methods. Using an ensemble of decision trees we achieve upwards of 85.7% and 80.7% accuracy when predicting the number of components and peaks in an image, respectively, using these heat-maps. We also question the currently used discrete classification schema and introduce a continuous scale that better reflects the uncertainty in transition between two classes, caused by sensitivity and resolution limits