6,983 research outputs found
Evolution of the 1-mlb mercury ion thruster subsystem
The developmental history, performance, and major lifetests of each component of the present 1-mlb (4.5 mN) thruster system are traced over the past 10 years. The 1-mlb thruster subsystem consists of an 8 cm diameter ion thruster mounted on 2 axis gimbals, a mercury propellant tank, a power electronics unit, a controller/digital interface unit, and necessary electrical harnesses plus propellant tankage and feed lines
An 8-cm electron bombardment thruster for auxiliary propulsion
Thruster size, beam current level, and specific impulse trade-offs are considered for mercury electron bombardment ion thrusters to be used for north-south station keeping of geosynchronous spacecraft. An 8-cm diameter thruster operating at 2750 seconds specific impulse at thrust levels of 4.4 mN (1 m1b) to 8.9 mN (2 m6b) with a design life of 20,000 hours and 10,000 cycles is being developed. The thruster will have a dished two-grid system capable of thrust vectoring of + or - 10 degrees in two orthogonal directions. A preliminary thruster has been fabricated and tested; thruster performance characteristics have been determined at 4.45, 6.68, and 8.90 millinewtons
High performance auxiliary-propulsion ion thruster with ion-machined accelerator grid
An improvement in thruster performance was achieved by reducing the diameter of the accelerator grid holes. The smaller accelerator grid holes resulted in a reduction in neutral mercury atoms escaping the discharge chamber, which in turn enhanced the discharge propellant utilization from approximately 68 percent to 92 percent. The accelerator grids were fabricated by ion machining with an 8-centimeter-diameter thruster, and the screen grid holes individually focused ion beamlets onto the blank accelerator grid. The resulting accelerator grid holes are less than 1.12 millimeters in diameter, while previously used accelerator grids had hole diameters of 1.69 millimeters. The thruster could be operated with the small-hole accelerator grid at neutralizer potential
Entropy of gravitating systems: scaling laws versus radial profiles
Through the consideration of spherically symmetric gravitating systems
consisting of perfect fluids with linear equation of state constrained to be in
a finite volume, an account is given of the properties of entropy at conditions
in which it is no longer an extensive quantity (it does not scale with system's
size). To accomplish this, the methods introduced by Oppenheim [1] to
characterize non-extensivity are used, suitably generalized to the case of
gravitating systems subject to an external pressure. In particular when, far
from the system's Schwarzschild limit, both area scaling for conventional
entropy and inverse radius law for the temperature set in (i.e. the same
properties of the corresponding black hole thermodynamical quantities), the
entropy profile is found to behave like 1/r, being r the area radius inside the
system. In such circumstances thus entropy heavily resides in internal layers,
in opposition to what happens when area scaling is gained while approaching the
Schwarzschild mass, in which case conventional entropy lies at the surface of
the system. The information content of these systems, even if it globally
scales like the area, is then stored in the whole volume, instead of packed on
the boundary.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures. v2: addition of some references; the stability
of equilibrium configurations is readdresse
Status of a five-centimeter-diameter ion thruster technology program
Prototype auxiliary propulsion subsystem with isolated single tank propellant feed system and 5-cm-diameter ion thruste
Dynamics of Extremal Black Holes
Particle scattering and radiation by a magnetically charged, dilatonic black
hole is investigated near the extremal limit at which the mass is a constant
times the charge. Near this limit a neighborhood of the horizon of the black
hole is closely approximated by a trivial product of a two-dimensional black
hole with a sphere. This is shown to imply that the scattering of
long-wavelength particles can be described by a (previously analyzed)
two-dimensional effective field theory, and is related to the
formation/evaporation of two-dimensional black holes. The scattering proceeds
via particle capture followed by Hawking re-emission, and naively appears to
violate unitarity. However this conclusion can be altered when the effects of
backreaction are included. Particle-hole scattering is discussed in the light
of a recent analysis of the two-dimensional backreaction problem. It is argued
that the quantum mechanical possibility of scattering off of extremal black
holes implies the potential existence of additional quantum numbers - referred
to as ``quantum whiskers'' - characterizing the black hole.Comment: 31 page
Comments on information loss and remnants
The information loss and remnant proposals for resolving the black hole
information paradox are reconsidered. It is argued that in typical cases
information loss implies energy loss, and thus can be thought of in terms of
coupling to a spectrum of ``fictitious'' remnants. This suggests proposals for
information loss that do not imply planckian energy fluctuations in the low
energy world. However, if consistency of gravity prevents energy
non-conservation, these remnants must then be considered to be real. In either
case, the catastrophe corresponding to infinite pair production remains a
potential problem. Using Reissner-Nordstrom black holes as a paradigm for a
theory of remnants, it is argued that couplings in such a theory may give
finite production despite an infinite spectrum. Evidence for this is found in
analyzing the instanton for Schwinger production; fluctuations from the
infinite number of states lead to a divergent stress tensor, spoiling the
instanton calculation. Therefore naive arguements for infinite production fail.Comment: 30 pages (harvmac l mode) UCSBTH-93-35 (minor reference and typo
corrections
Interpreting the chemical composition of fluid inclusions: : The connection to bulk water analyses
Symmetries in two-dimensional dilaton gravity with matter
The symmetries of generic 2D dilaton models of gravity with (and without)
matter are studied in some detail. It is shown that , one of the
symmetries of the matterless models, can be generalized to the case where
matter fields of any kind are present. The general (classical) solution for
some of these models, in particular those coupled to chiral matter, which
generalizes the Vaidya solution of Einstein Gravity, is also given.Comment: Minor changes have been made; the references have been updated and
some added; 11 pages. To appear in Phys. Rev.
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