Space mission planning/scheduling is determining the set of spacecraft activities to meet mission objectives while respecting mission constraints. One important type of mission constraint is data management. As the spacecraft acquires data via its scientific instruments, it must store the data onboard until it is able to downlink it to ground communications stations. Because onboard storage is ...

This study was the first in a series of planned tests to use physics-based subsystem simulations to investigate the interactions between a spacecraft’s crew and a ground-based mission control center for vehicle subsystem operations across long communication delays. The simulation models the life support system of a deep space habitat. It contains models of an environmental control and life supp...

FEED manufacturers are often forced by circumstances to focus on short-term concerns such as: How many tons were produced this week? How many customers do I have, or how much down time did I have this week? While important, short-term problems can cause manufacturers to focus on solving problems rather than pursuing the company’s mission. Manufacturers who regularly examine their company’s miss...

As the complexity of military operations increases, defense modeling and simulation (DM&S) has contributed in analytically improving doctrines at various levels. To date, defense modelers concentrate on the best representation model of their targeted system at their targeted level with their targeted doctrine. However, insights into the doctrine from the battle experiment using such models are ...

Many companies –large and small– have at some time in their history conducted a in-depth review of their purpose: “what they are there for”. The result very often is a mission statement, values statement, or some such. The real challenge, however, is to get that mission and those values across to the company as a whole, so that they are espoused by all members of the organization. The problem i...

As systems of multiple robots become more prevalent both in research and in real world applications, they may be required to handle new missions, collaborate in teams they are not necessarily familiar with, and react, during mission execution, to changes in both the environment and in their own abilities. In this paper we describe a six-layered architecture that handles inherently these challen...

This paper looks at the three-way relationship between the Government of Chad, humanitarians, and the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) from 2004 until June 2011. Chad was never comfortable with the international presence of either humanitarians or peacekeepers and asserted its sovereignty increasingly during this period. MINURCAT was deployed in 2008 to...

A commercial electromechanical actuator (EMA) is to be dynamically tested with predetermined stroke and load profiles for transient thermal and electric power behavior to validate a numerical model used for aerospace applications. The EMA will follow the stroke profile representative of a real aircraft mission duty cycle. A hydraulic press will exert a corresponding load profile onto the EMA. S...