In-flight determination of spacecraft magnetic bias independent of attitude

A simple algorithm for the in-flight determination of the magnetic bias of a spacecraft is presented. The algorithm, developed for use during the Hubble Space Telescope mission, determines this bias independently of any attitude estimates and requires no spacecraft sensor data other than that from the spacecraft magnetometer(s). Estimates of the algorithm's accuracy and results from a number of numerical studies on the use of this algorithm are also presented

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

elasticLM: A novel approach for software licensing in distributed computing infrastructures

A recent survey of the 451group on Cloud usage highlights software licensing as one of the top five obstacles for Cloud computing, quite similar to what has been observed in the Grid already a couple of years. The reasons are the same: the current praxis of software licensing, both in terms of business models and licensing technology. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments, especially when the environment stretches across administrative domains like it is the case for public Clouds. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application

Formation of P Cygni profiles with limb darkening of the stellar core

In the framework of the Sobolev approximation, the effects of limb darkening of the stellar core on the formation of line profiles in rapidly expanding envelopes are investigated. For the case of outward-accelerating envelopes, it is shown that the P Cygni profiles, calculated with and without limb darkening, do appear almost identical as long as the size of the envelope remains large with respect to the radius of the star. As the extent of the envelope decreases, the resulting profiles are found to differ appreciably close to the line center. When considering outward-decelerating (or equivalently inward-accelerating) envelopes, calculations with the limb darkening effects reveal that the P Cygni profiles are more strongly affected than in the previous case. These effects are specially important in the blue wing and near the center of the resulting line profiles, irrespective of the size of the envelope