MISAT is a research and development cluster which will create a small satellite platform based on Micro Systems Technology (MST) aiming at innovative space as well as terrestrial applications. MISAT is part of the Dutch MicroNed program which has established a microsystems infrastructure to fully exploit the MST knowledge chain involving public and industrial partners alike. The cluster covers ...

While hundreds of planets have been discovered around field stars, only a few are known in star clusters. To explain the lack of short-period giant planets in globular clusters (GCs), such as 47 Tucane and ω Centauri, it has been suggested that their low metallicities may have prevented planet formation. Alternatively, the high rates of close stellar encounters in these clusters may have influe...

The government, corporate, and industrial communities are faced with an ever increasing number of databases. These databases need not only to be managed, but also explored. The first requires secure access to distributed heterogeneous multimedia databases with rich metadata and having to meet timing constraints. The second requires exploratory tools supporting the identification of domain and m...

Cyber Mission Resilience (CMR) is a significant step in the evolution of IT security. Not only does it reduce the complexity and cost of securing today’s IT systems, it helps prioritize security-related activities. The focus on mission resilience extends the scope of past security practices while simultaneously honing in on mission-critical systems, networks, and processes. This article explore...

The previous schemes of key establishment in the wireless sensor networks may not be employed for the mission-critical application due to several limitations: lightweightness and scalability from the point of performance, vulnerabilities against node compromise and various existing attacks from the point of security. In this paper, after identifying security requirements of mission-critical app...

Networking unattended sensors is expected to have a significant impact on the efficiency of many military and civil applications. Sensors in such systems are typically disposable and expected to last until their energy drains. Therefore, energy is a very scarce resource for such sensor systems and has to be managed wisely in order to extend the life of the sensors for the duration of a particul...

E-mail is a mission-critical communication function for virtually all institutions, including corporations, universities, militaries, and families. Given the paramount importance of e-mail in modern society, it is disturbing how vulnerable the e-mail user can be to attacks and failures. Indeed, modern e-mail employs a server-centric design, in the user is critically dependent on its mail server...

BACKGROUND Gulf veterans report medically unexplained symptoms more frequently than non-Gulf veterans did. We examined whether Gulf and non-Gulf veterans could be distinguished by their patterns of symptom reporting. METHOD A k-means cluster analysis was applied to 500 randomly sampled veterans from each of three United Kingdom military cohorts of veterans; those deployed to the Gulf conflict...

We present examples of electron measurements from the PEACE instruments on the Cluster spacecraft in the high-latitude, high-altitude region of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Using electron density and energy spectra measurements, we examine two cases where the orbit of the Cluster tetrahedron is outbound over the northern hemisphere, in the afternoon sector approaching the magnetopause. Data from ...