Definition, technology readiness, and development cost of the orbit transfer vehicle engine integrated control and health monitoring system elements

An Integrated Control and Health Monitoring (ICHM) system was conceived for use on a 20 Klb thrust baseline Orbit Transfer Vehicle (OTV) engine. Considered for space used, the ICHM was defined for reusability requirements for an OTV engine service free life of 20 missions, with 100 starts and a total engine operational time of 4 hours. Functions were derived by flowing down requirements from NASA guidelines, previous OTV engine or ICHM documents, and related contracts. The elements of an ICHM were identified and listed, and these elements were described in sufficient detail to allow estimation of their technology readiness levels. These elements were assessed in terms of technology readiness level, and supporting rationale for these assessments presented. The remaining cost for development of a minimal ICHM system to technology readiness level 6 was estimated. The estimates are within an accuracy range of minus/plus 20 percent. The cost estimates cover what is needed to prepare an ICHM system for use on a focussed testbed for an expander cycle engine, excluding support to the actual test firings

On the evolution of cooling cores in X-ray galaxy clusters

(Abridged) To define a framework for the formation and evolution of the cooling cores in X-ray galaxy clusters, we study how the physical properties change as function of the cosmic time in the inner regions of a 4 keV and 8 keV galaxy cluster under the action of radiative cooling and gravity only. The cooling radius, R_cool, defined as the radius at which the cooling time equals the Universe age at given redshift, evolves from ~0.01 R200 at z>2, where the structures begin their evolution, to ~0.05 R200 at z=0. The values measured at 0.01 R200 show an increase of about 15-20 per cent per Gyr in the gas density and surface brightness and a decrease with a mean rate of 10 per cent per Gyr in the gas temperature. The emission-weighted temperature diminishes by about 25 per cent and the bolometric X-ray luminosity rises by a factor ~2 after 10 Gyrs when all the cluster emission is considered in the computation. On the contrary, when the core region within 0.15 R500 is excluded, the gas temperature value does not change and the X-ray luminosity varies by 10-20 per cent only. The cooling time and gas entropy radial profiles are well represented by power-law functions. The behaviour of the inner slopes of the gas temperature and density profiles are the most sensitive and unambiguous tracers of an evolving cooling core. Their values after 10 Gyrs of radiative losses, T_gas ~ r^0.4 and n_gas ~ r^(-1.2) for the hot (cool) object, are remarkably in agreement with the observational constraints available for nearby X-ray luminous cooling core clusters. Because our simulations do not consider any AGN heating, they imply that the feedback process does not greatly alter the gas density and temperature profiles as generated by radiative cooling alone.Comment: 8 pages. MNRAS in pres