Thermal Modeling in Support of the Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks Project

NASA's Edison program is intending to launch a swarm of at least 8 small satellites in 2013. This swarm of 1.5U Cubesats, the Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks (EDSN) project, will demonstrate intra-swarm communications and multi-point in-situ space physics data acquisition. In support of the design and testing of the EDSN satellites, a geometrically accurate thermal model has been constructed. Due to the low duty cycle of most components, no significant overheating issues were found. The predicted mininum temperatures of the external antennas are low enough, however, that some mitigation may be in order. The development and application of the model will be discussed in detail

Pulling Marbles from a Bag: Deducing the Regional Impact History of the SPA Basin from Impact-Melt Rocks

The South Pole Aitken (SPA) basin is the stratigraphically oldest identifiable lunar basin and is therefore one of the most important targets for absolute age-dating to help understand whether ancient lunar bombardment history smoothly declined or was punctuated by a cataclysm. A feasible near-term approach to this problem is to robotically collect a sample from near the center of the basin, where vertical and lateral mixing provided by post-basin impacts ensures that such a sample will be composed of small rock fragments from SPA itself, from local impact craters, and from faraway giant basins. The range of ages, intermediate spikes in the age distribution, and the oldest ages are all part of the definition of the absolute age and impact history recorded within the SPA basin

Additional Developments in Atmosphere Revitalization Modeling and Simulation

NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) program is developing prototype systems, demonstrating key capabilities, and validating operational concepts for future human missions beyond Earth orbit. These forays beyond the confines of earth's gravity will place unprecedented demands on launch systems. They must launch the supplies needed to sustain a crew over longer periods for exploration missions beyond earth's moon. Thus all spacecraft systems, including those for the separation of metabolic carbon dioxide and water from a crewed vehicle, must be minimized with respect to mass, power, and volume. Emphasis is also placed on system robustness both to minimize replacement parts and ensure crew safety when a quick return to earth is not possible. Current efforts are focused on improving the current state-of-the-art systems utilizing fixed beds of sorbent pellets by evaluating structured sorbents, seeking more robust pelletized sorbents, and examining alternate bed configurations to improve system efficiency and reliability. These development efforts combine testing of sub-scale systems and multi-physics computer simulations to evaluate candidate approaches, select the best performing options, and optimize the configuration of the selected approach. This paper describes the continuing development of atmosphere revitalization models and simulations in support of the Atmosphere Revitalization Recovery and Environmental Monitoring (ARREM

Advancements in Carbon Dioxide and Water Vapor Separations Using COMSOL

No abstract availabl

Simple hydrodynamical Simulations of the Circumnuclear Disk

The “circumnuclear disk” (CND) is a dense, clumpy, asymmetric ring‐like feature centered on Sgr A*. The outer edge of the CND is not distinct but the disk extends for more than 7 pc; the distinct inner edge, at a radius of ≃1.5 pc, surrounds the “mini‐spiral” of the HII region, Sgr A West. We present simple 3D hydrodynamical models of the formation and evolution of the CND from multiple selfgravitating infalling clouds and compare the results with recent observations. We assume the clouds are initially Bonner‐Ebert spheres, in equilibrium with a hot confining inter‐cloud medium. We include the gravitational potential due to the point‐mass of Sgr A* as well as the extended mass distribution of the underlying stellar population. We also include the effects of the ram pressure due to the stellar winds from the central cluster of early‐type stars. A single spherically symmetric cloud cannot reproduce the clumpy morphology of the CND; multiple clouds on diverse trajectories are required so that cloud‐cloud collisions can circularize the clouds' orbits while maintaining a clumpy morphology. Collisions also serve to compress the clouds, delaying tidal disruption while potentially hastening gravitational collapse. Low density clumps are disrupted before reaching the inner CND radius, forming short‐lived arcs. The outer parts of more massive clumps get tidally stripped, forming long‐lived low‐density wide‐angle arcs, while their cores potentially undergo gravitational collapse. The fine balance between resisting tidal disruption and preventing gravitational collapse implies that most if not all clumps are not stable for much more than an orbit. Thus, in order for the CND to be a long‐lived clumpy object, it must be continually fed by additional in‐falling clouds. Clouds that survive to small radii are likely to be the sites of present or future star formation. However, within a few parsecs of Sgr A*, the stellar winds decelerate any in‐falling cloud so that the wind‐cloud interface becomes Rayleigh‐Taylor unstable, potentially disrupting the cloud and inhibiting star formation

The Role of Magnetic Field Dissipation in the Black Hole Candidate Sgr A*

The compact, nonthermal radio source Sgr A* at the Galactic Center appears to be coincident with a 2.6 million solar mass point-like object. Its energy source may be the release of gravitational energy as gas from the interstellar medium descends into its potential well. Simple attempts at calculating the spectrum and flux based on this picture have come close to the observations, yet have had difficulty in accounting for the low efficiency in this source. There now appear to be two reasons for this low conversion rate: (1) the plasma separates into two temperatures, with the protons attaining a significantly higher temperature than that of the radiating electrons, and (2) the magnetic field, B, is sub-equipartition, which reduces the magnetic bremsstrahlung emissivity, and therefore the overall power of Sgr A*. We investigate the latter with improvement over what has been attempted before: rather than calculating B based on a presumed model, we instead infer its distribution with radius empirically with the requirement that the resulting spectrum matches the observations. Our ansatz for B(r) is motivated in part by earlier calculations of the expected magnetic dissipation rate due to reconnection in a compressed flow. We find reasonable agreement with the observed spectrum of Sgr A* as long as its distribution consists of 3 primary components: an outer equipartition field, a roughly constant field at intermediate radii (~1000 Schwarzschild radii), and an inner dynamo (more or less within the last stable orbit for a non-rotating black hole) which increases B to about 100 Gauss. The latter component accounts for the observed sub-millimiter hump in this source.Comment: 33 pages including 2 figures; submitted to Ap

Hydrodynamical Accretion Onto Sgr A* From Distributed Point Sources

Spectral and kinematic studies suggest that the nonthermal radio source Sgr A*, located at the center of the Milky Way, is a supermassive compact object with a mass 2-3 million solar masses. Winds from nearby stars, located approximately 0.06 pc to the east of Sgr A*, should, in the absence of any outflow from the putative black hole itself, be accreting onto this object. We report the results of the first 3D Bondi-Hoyle hydrodynamical numerical simulations of this process under the assumption that the Galactic center wind is generated by several different point sources (here assumed to be 10 pseudo-randomly placed stars). Our results show that the accretion rate onto the central object can be higher than in the case of a uniform flow since wind-wind shocks dissipate some of the bulk kinetic energy and lead to a higher capture rate for the gas. However, even for this highly non-uniform medium, most of the accreting gas carries with it a relatively low level of specific angular momentum, though large transient fluctuations can occur. Additionally, the post-bow-shock focusing of the gas can be substantially different than that for a uniform flow, but it depends strongly on the stellar spatial distribution. We discuss how this affects the morphology of the gas in the inner 0.15 pc of the Galaxy and the consequences for accretion disk models of Sgr A*.Comment: 17 pages, including 4 PS figures; uses aasms4.sty; accepted by ApJ

Efficient energy transfer in light-harvesting systems, I: optimal temperature, reorganization energy, and spatial-temporal correlations

Understanding the mechanisms of efficient and robust energy transfer in light-harvesting systems provides new insights for the optimal design of artificial systems. In this paper, we use the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) protein complex and phycocyanin 645 (PC 645) to explore the general dependence on physical parameters that help maximize the efficiency and maintain its stability. With the Haken-Strobl model, the maximal energy transfer efficiency (ETE) is achieved under an intermediate optimal value of dephasing rate. To avoid the infinite temperature assumption in the Haken-Strobl model and the failure of the Redfield equation in predicting the Forster rate behavior, we use the generalized Bloch-Redfield (GBR) equation approach to correctly describe dissipative exciton dynamics and find that maximal ETE can be achieved under various physical conditions, including temperature, reorganization energy, and spatial-temporal correlations in noise. We also identify regimes of reorganization energy where the ETE changes monotonically with temperature or spatial correlation and therefore cannot be optimized with respect to these two variables