S pace nuclear power is a doubleedged sword. Although it has played a constructive role in the exploration of space and could continue to do so, it has been burdened by an extensive history of aCCidents and failures, both Soviet and American. Numerous nuclear-powered spacecraft have released radioactive materials. Spent reactors now in Earth orbit exacerbate the threat posed by orbital debris. ...

Several GIS applications are characterized by the vast amount of information that needs to be stored, retrieved and analyzed. The volume and complexity of the data will continue to grow in the future as is apparent from the expected geo-spatial petabyte data set for NASA’s EOSDIS project which will hold a collection of raster images arriving at a rate of 3-5 Mbytes/second for 10 years from sate...

Future Low Earth Orbiting spacecrafts will contain several IP-enabled devices that are accessible by users through ground stations. As the spacecraft moves around the Earth, mobility solution, such as Mobile IPv6 can be used to handle the mobility of the devices when satellites handover between ground stations. However, if the devices are connected to an on-board Local Area Network, the mobilit...

The ability of Global Positioning System Radio Occultation (GPS/RO) to improve tropospheric profile retrievals was examined. Retrievals were performed using IR and MW radiometric measurements from the ATOVS (Advanced TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder) on current NOAA polar orbiting satellites and simulated high spectral resolution infrared measurements from the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (Cr...

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) and the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) will make global observations of the total column dry-air mole fraction of atmospheric CO2 (XCO2 ) starting in 2008. Although satellites have global coverage, XCO2 retrievals will be made only a few times each month over a given location and will only be sampled in clear conditions. Modelers will use XCO2...

We analyse a simple model of the heat transfer to and from a small satellite orbiting round a solar system planet. Our approach considers the satellite isothermal, with external heat input from the environment and from internal energy dissipation, and output to the environment as black-body radiation. The resulting nonlinear ordinary differential equation for the satellite’s temperature is anal...

Space is an unforgiving environment – one of harshest known to mankind. Yet, space is far less understood than other service environments in which DOD systems operate. It has been known to limit the useful life of satellites, with 20 to 25% of all mission failures being attributed to the effects of the space environment.[1] Since access to space is so costly, materials and components must funct...

Prognostic technology uses a series of algorithms, combined forms a prognostic-based inference engine (PBIE) for the identification of deterministic behavior embedded in completely normal appearing telemetry from fully functional equipment. The algorithms used to define normal behavior in the PBIE from which deterministic behavior is identified can be adapted to quantify normal spacecraft telem...

Clustering has gained widespread use, especially for static data. However, the rapid growth of spatio-temporal data from numerous instruments, such as earth-orbiting satellites, has created a need for spatio-temporal clustering methods to extract and monitor dynamic clusters. Dynamic spatiotemporal clustering faces two major challenges: First, the clusters are dynamic and may change in size, sh...