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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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Optical and infrared interferometry will open new vistas for astronomy over the next decade. Space based interferometers, operating unfettered by the Earth's atmosphere, will offer the greatest scientific payoff. They also present the greatest technological challenge: laser metrology systems must perform with sub-nanometer precision; mechanical vibrations must be controlled to nanometers requiring orders of magnitude distrubance rejection; a multitude of actuators and sensors must operate flawlessly and in concert.
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Optical and infrared interferometry will open new vistas for astronomy over the next decade. The Interferometry Technology Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is addressing these challenges with a development program that plans to establish technology readiness for the Space Interferometry Mission by end of 2001.
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The main testbed objective is to demonstrate nanometer class stability of fringes in the dim star, or science, interferometer while using path length & angle feed-forward control, and while the instrument is integrated atop a flight-like flexible structure. This document addresses completion of the Path Length Feed Forward milestone, which requires at least 40 dB of external delay rejection at some frequency between 0.1 and 1.0 Hz.
The detection of indigenous water in mare basaltic glass beads has challenged the view established since the Apollo era of a "dry" Moon. Since this discovery, measurements of water in lunar apatite, olivine-hosted melt inclusions, agglutinates, and nominally anhydrous minerals have confirmed that lunar igneous materials contain water, implying that some parts of lunar mantle may have as much water as Earth's upper mantle. The interpretation of hydrogen (H) isotopes in lunar samples, however, is controversial. The large variation of H isotope ratios in lunar apatite (delta Deuterium = -202 to +1010 per mille) has been taken as evidence that water in the lunar interior comes from the lunar mantle, solar wind protons, and/or comets. The very low deuterium/H ratios in lunar agglutinates indicate that solar wind protons have contributed to their hydrogen content. Conversely, H isotopes in lunar volcanic glass beads and olivine-hosted melt inclusions being similar to those of common terrestrial igneous rocks, suggest a common origin for water in both Earth and Moon. Lunar water could be inherited from carbonaceous chondrites, consistent with the model of late accretion of chondrite-type materials to the Moon as proposed by. One complication about the sources of lunar water, is that geologic processes (e.g., late accretion and magmatic degassing) may have modified the H isotope signatures of lunar materials. Recent FTIR analyses have shown that plagioclases in lunar ferroan anorthosite contain approximately 6 ppm H2O. So far, ferroan anorthosite is the only available lithology that is believed to be a primary product of the lunar magma ocean (LMO). A possible consequence is that the LMO could have contained up to approximately 320 ppm H2O. Here we examine the possible sources of water in the LMO through measurements of water abundances and H isotopes in plagioclase of two ferroan anorthosites and one troctolite from lunar highlands.