Electrical/​Electronics

A wide-band penetrating radar system for measuring the thickness of sea ice is under development. The need for this or a similar system arises as follows: Spatial and temporal variations in the thickness of sea ice are important indicators of heat fluxes between the ocean and atmosphere and, hence,...

A proposed device for combining or switching electromagnetic beams would have three ports, would not contain any moving parts, and would be switchable among three operating states:

This design allows broadband power combining with high isolation between the H port and E port, and achieves a lower insertion loss than any other broadband planar magic-T. Passive micro wave/millimeter-wave signal power is combined both in-phase and out-of-phase at the ports, with the phase error being less than...

The Next Generation Flight Controller Trainer (NGFCT) is a relatively inexpensive system of hardware and software that provides high- fidelity training for space-shuttle flight controllers. NGFCT provides simulations into which are integrated the behaviors of emulated space-shuttle vehicle onboard...

A quasi-optical transmission line (QOTL) has been developed as a low-loss transmission line for a spaceborne cloud-observing radar instrument that operates at a nominal frequency of 94 GHz. This QOTL could also readily be redesigned for use in terrestrial millimeter- wave radar systems and...

Single-event upsets (SEUs) pose great threats to avionic systems' state machine control logic, which are frequently used to control sequence of events and to qualify protocols. The risks of SEUs manifest in two ways: (a) the state machine's state information is changed, causing the...

A document discusses a method by which GMSK (Gaussian minimum shift keying) modulation and a pseudonoise (PN) ranging signal may be combined. By isolating the in-phase and quadrature components after carrier lock, and extracting their low-pass and band-pass filtered components, there is enough information...

A document discusses placing memory modules on the high-speed serial interconnect, which is used by a spacecraft’s computer elements for inter-processor communications, to allow all multiple computer system architectures to access the spacecraft data storage at the same time. Each memory board is...

A report discusses integrating multiple memory modules on the high-speed serial interconnect (IEEE 1393) that is used by a spacecraft’s inter-module communications in order to ease data congestion and provide for a scalable, strong, flexible system that can meet new system-level mass memory requirements.

An optoelectronic metrology system is used for determining the attitude and flexing of a large spaceborne radar antenna or similar structure. The measurements are needed for accurate pointing of the antenna and correction and control of the phase of the radar signal wavefront. The system...

An architecture has been designed that integrates formation estimation methodologies, precision formation sensing, and high- bandwidth formation communication into a robust, strap-on system that meets knowledge and communication requirements for the majority of planned, precision...

A document describes the Inter - planetary Overlay Networking Protocol Accelerator (IONAC) — an electronic apparatus, now under development, for relaying data at high rates in spacecraft and interplanetary radio-communication systems utilizing a delay-tolerant networking protocol. The...

Researchers at the University of Michigan, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and the University of California at San Diego recently demonstrated the fastest quantum computer bit that exploits the main advantage of the qubit over the conventional bit. The scientists used lasers to create an initialized quantum state of this...