Enhancing Flight Test Safety with Real-Time Early Warning Techniques

Contemporary approaches to aerospace vehicle system monitoring rely heavily on thresholds that represent a compromise between providing warning early enough to avert a mishap while simultaneously minimizing false alarms. While this reliance on thresholds has been in place for decades and has permeated both cockpits and control rooms, we often find it insufficient when retrospectively analyzing data from an accident. To modernize and enhance flight test safety, we introduce new methods of monitoring for anomalous patterns of interaction rather than for thresholds exceedance. For systems with a well characterized baseline we show how the Inductive Monitoring System (IMS), utilized by NASA in the aftermath of the Columbia accident, might be implemented in real-time to provide earlier warning than currently employed techniques. For systems without such a baseline, we introduce new developments in statistical methods relating to critical slowing down, first applied in medicine and physics, which show promise for adaptation to flight test. Finally, the familiar resource constrained environment leads to a reliance on increased instrumentation that is challenging the limits of the current "one-sensor, one-indicator" threshold paradigm. Existing methods thus fail to accurately reflect the true complexity of a vehicle rich with interdependent interacting systems. We highlight these concepts in a brief summary of the 2001 Air Transat Flight 236 deadstick landing in the Azores. We then suggest control room and cockpit modifications to better display the information gleaned using these novel monitoring methods

Evidence for Solar Influences on Nuclear Decay Rates

Recent reports of periodic fluctuations in nuclear decay data of certain isotopes have led to the suggestion that nuclear decay rates are being influenced by the Sun, perhaps via neutrinos. Here we present evidence for the existence of an additional periodicity that appears to be related to the Rieger periodicity well known in solar physics.Comment: Presented at the Fifth Meeting on CPT and Lorentz Symmetry, Bloomington, Indiana, June 28-July 2, 201

Additional experimental evidence for a solar influence on nuclear decay rates

Additional experimental evidence is presented in support of the recent hypothesis that a possible solar influence could explain fluctuations observed in the measured decay rates of some isotopes. These data were obtained during routine weekly calibrations of an instrument used for radiological safety at The Ohio State University Research Reactor using Cl-36. The detector system used was based on a Geiger-Mueller gas detector, which is a robust detector system with very low susceptibility to environmental changes. A clear annual variation is evident in the data, with a maximum relative count rate observed in January/February, and a minimum relative count rate observed in July/August, for seven successive years from July 2005 to June 2011. This annual variation is not likely to have arisen from changes in the detector surroundings, as we show here.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Exploring physics beyond the standard model: Astrophysical motivations and accelerator applications

We report the motivation and results of a search for beryllium, Be, with electrons which violate the Pauli exclusion principle. We then present the run by run results of our completed search for the Pauli-forbidden 1 s4 state of Be, denoted by Be′. In contrast to most experiments of this type we have obtained unique samples with higher probability of Be′ retention. We set limits on the abundance of Be′ in metallic Be, Be ore, natural gas, and air with abundances around 10−11. Our results improve on those obtained in a previous search for Be′ by a factor of approximately 300. We also discuss the motivation and results from a search for strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPs) attached to gold (and briefly iron) nuclei. After discussing the cosmological motivations for such a particle we proceed to discuss the details of its interactions with gold before presenting our results. We are able to significantly constrain the existence of such SIMPs with abundances of less than 10−12 for low mass SIMPs (MS ≈ 3 amu) to 10−8 for superheavy SIMPs (MS ≈ 1, 578 amu). We also provide significant constraints on the possible SIMP contribution to the cosmological density parameter and rule out SIMPs with M s \u3c 10 amu as a possible mechanism to create the desired condition, Ω = 1. As in the search for Be′, unique Au samples were obtained from a variety of sources with different histories ranging from 40 million year old gold nuggets from Australia to gold foils flown on NASA\u27s LDEF satellite