The challenging scales of the bird: Shuttle tile structural integrity

The principal design issues, tests, and analyses required to solve the tile integrity problem on the space shuttle orbiters are addressed. Proof testing of installed tiles is discussed along with an airflow test of special tiles. Orbiter windshield tiles are considered in terms of changes necessary to ensure acceptable margins of safety for flight

Finite-Difference and Pseudospectral Time-Domain Methods Applied to Backwards-Wave Metamaterials

Backwards-wave (BW) materials that have simultaneously negative real parts of their electric permittivity and magnetic permeability can support waves where phase and power propagation occur in opposite directions. These materials were predicted to have many unusual electromagnetic properties, among them amplification of the near-field of a point source, which could lead to the perfect reconstruction of the source field in an image [J. Pendry, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{85}, 3966 (2000)]. Often systems containing BW materials are simulated using the finite-difference time-domain technique. We show that this technique suffers from a numerical artifact due to its staggered grid that makes its use in simulations involving BW materials problematic. The pseudospectral time-domain technique, on the other hand, uses a collocated grid and is free of this artifact. It is also shown that when modeling the dispersive BW material, the linear frequency approximation method introduces error that affects the frequency of vanishing reflection, while the auxiliary differential equation, the Z transform, and the bilinear frequency approximation method produce vanishing reflection at the correct frequency. The case of vanishing reflection is of particular interest for field reconstruction in imaging applications.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagatio

Origin of Lagrangian Intermittency in Drift-Wave Turbulence

The Lagrangian velocity statistics of dissipative drift-wave turbulence are investigated. For large values of the adiabaticity (or small collisionality), the probability density function of the Lagrangian acceleration shows exponential tails, as opposed to the stretched exponential or algebraic tails, generally observed for the highly intermittent acceleration of Navier-Stokes turbulence. This exponential distribution is shown to be a robust feature independent of the Reynolds number. For small adiabaticity, algebraic tails are observed, suggesting the strong influence of point-vortex-like dynamics on the acceleration. A causal connection is found between the shape of the probability density function and the autocorrelation of the norm of the acceleration

Some developments in improved methods for the measurements of the spectral irradiances of solar simulators

Measurement of spectral emission from solar simulators - photoelectric photometr

Entry corridor definition and SM/RCS deorbit requirements for Apollo block 1 earth orbit missions. Project Apollo

Entry corridor definition and SM reaction control system for Apollo Block 1 earth orbit mission

Nearby Gas-Rich Low Surface Brightness Galaxies

We examine the Fisher-Tully cz<1000 km/s galaxy sample to determine whether it is a complete and representative sample of all galaxy types, including low surface brightness populations, as has been recently claimed. We find that the sample is progressively more incomplete for galaxies with (1) smaller physical diameters at a fixed isophote and (2) lower HI masses. This is likely to lead to a significant undercounting of nearby gas-rich low surface brightness galaxies. However, through comparisons to other samples we can understand how the nearby galaxy counts need to be corrected, and we see some indications of environmental effects that probably result from the local high density of galaxies.Comment: 12 page, 2 figures, to appear in Ap

Comment on "Fano Resonance for Anderson Impurity Systems"

In a recent Letter, Luo et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 256602 (2004)) analyze the Fano line shapes obtained from scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) of transition metal impurities on a simple metal surface, in particular of the Ti/Au(111) and Ti/Ag(100) systems. As the key point of their analysis, they claim that there is not only a Fano interference effect between the impurity d-orbital and the conduction electron continuum, as derived in Ujsaghy et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2557 (2000)), but that the Kondo resonance in the d-electron spectral density has by itself a second Fano line shape, leading to the experimentally observed spectra. In the present note we point out that this analysis is conceptually incorrect. Therefore, the quantitative agreement of the fitted theoretical spectra with the experimental results is meaningless.Comment: 1 page, no figures. Accepted for publication in PRL; revised version uploaded on November 18th, 200