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Althea V Moorhead

Publications and source records attributed to Althea V Moorhead.

Meteor Shower Forecasting in Near-Earth Space

NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO) produces an annual meteor shower forecast in order to help spacecraft operators assess the risk posed by meteoroid streams. Previously, this forecast focused on the International Space Station and therefore reported meteoroid fluxes and enhancement factors at an orbital altitude of 400 km. This paper presents an updated forecast algorithm that has an improved calculation of the flux enhancement produced by showers and can calculate fluxes at any selected Earth or lunar orbital altitude. Finally, we discuss and generate forecasted fluxes for the 2018 Draconid meteor shower, which is expected to produce meteoroid flux enhancements near the Sun-Earth L1 and L2 Lagrange points but not at Earth.

Althea V Moorhead↗

Is LaTeX Use Correlated with the Number of Equations in a Manuscript?

Astronomers often use LaTeX to compose and submit paper manuscripts (1), but its adoption is not universal. Some journals prefer Word submissions, and large organizations with standardized software loads may also pressure their scientists to use Word. Furthermore, text and table transcription has been shown to be more efficient with Word than with LaTeX (2). LaTeX is most favored by fields that are mathematically intensive (1). While Knauff and Nejasmic (2) found Word to be similarly efficient in transcribing equations, users reported greater enjoyment of LaTeX. We suspect that Word may therefore influence its users to include fewer equations, but this underlying hypothesis is not easily tested. We test the hypothesis that manuscripts submitted to the arXiV in LaTeX format have more equations on average than those submitted in PDF format only.

Althea V Moorhead↗