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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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At least 271 records · Page 15
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NASA NTRS1985

Persistence of phosphor glow in microchannel plate image intensifiers

Image intensifier tubes using microchannel plate amplification stages and phosphor output stages are being increasingly used in various detection applications. In this paper, measurements of the decay times of what are attributed to be the P20 phosphors in various image intensifiers are reported. It is found that the long tail on the decay curve of the phosphor following illumination can be a limitation for certain observations. In addition, the background level of phosphor glow (which is seen by the subsequent detection system as a light signal) continues to build with continuing illumination.

Torr, M. R.↗
NASA NTRS1985

Persistence of shocks to large distances in the solar wind

Present hydrodynamic models of solar wind streams predict that interactions will cause interplanetary shocks to decay and large-scale structures to coalesce and smooth out, with a decay length of 10-15 AU for moderate or small-amplitude shocks. The Pioneer 10 plasma data, extending 1-30 AU, are examined in the light of such predictions. It is found that coalescence of streams into a single stream per solar rotation does occur, in general, but that considerable structure remains by 30 AU. The leading edge of a stream often exhibits a velocity jump of greater than 20 km/s; many of these may be shocks. There is a characteristic velocity-density-temperature signature of these distant streams which differs from the close-in double-shock signature. A unique transient was seen in July 1982, at 28 AU, with a velocity jump of about 235 km/s.

Kayser, S. E.↗
NASA NTRS1985

Persistent anomalies, blocking and variations in atmospheric predictability

The fully nonlinear, equivalent-barotropic vorticity equation on the sphere, with simplified forcing, dissipation and topography, is the model used in the present consideration of low frequency variability regimes in large scale atmospheric dynamics. The solutions obtained are studied as a function of the nondimensional intensity of the forcing and dissipation. The number of modes retained in the analysis allows the multiple equilibria thus obtained, which exhibit blocked and zonal flow patterns very similar to synoptically defined zonal and blocked Northern Hemisphere midlatitude flows, to appear for realistic values of the forcing. The number of episodes of blocked or zonal flow decreases monotonically as their duration increases, in agreement with observations.

Legras, B.↗
NASA NTRS1987

Persistent emission and bursts from Aquila X-1 observed by Einstein

A two-component model is applied to an X-ray outburst from Aql X-1 recorded by the Einstein Observatory in March-April 1979. The model treats such outbursts as a combination of a soft, multicolor component (accretion disk) and a hard-blackbody component (boundary layer emission). Evaluation of the light curves indicates that the bursts were caused by an increase in the accretion rate. The calculations also suggest that the system observed is inclined at a 33 deg angle.

Czerny, M.↗
NASA NTRS1988

Robust adaptive regulation without persistent excitation

A globally convergent adaptive regulator for minimum or nonminimum phase systems subject to bounded distrubances and unmodeled dynamics is presented. The control strategy is designed for a particular input-output representation obtained from the state space representation of the system. The leading coefficient of the new representation is the product of the observability and controllability matrices of the system. The controller scheme uses a Least Squares identification algorithm with a dead zone. The dead zone is chosen to obtain convergence properties on the estimates and on the covariance matrix as well. This allows the definition of modified estimates which secure well-conditioned matrices in the adaptive control law. Explicit bounds on the plant output are given.

Lozano-Leal, Rogelio↗
NASA NTRS1988

The relative utility of persistence and medium-range dynamical forecasts of monthly mean 700 mb heights

The proposal of Harnack et al. (1986) that monthly 700-mb height anomalies can be predicted using simulated medium-range numerical forecasts is tested with actual numerical forecasts produced under strict operational conditions. These conditions included nonavailability of long model forecast histories from which to develop estimates of drift, frequent model changes over the period of the experiment, a requirement that each monthly forecast be made four days before the beginning of the month, and the use of only data which are available on the day of the forecast. The overall results and month-by-month results confirm the hypothesis of the Harnack group.

Livezey, Robert E.↗
NASA NTRS1988

Relationships between persistent large-scale flow anomalies and variation in synoptic-scale eddy activity and cyclogenesis

Observational analyses to study the relationships between large-scale flow anomalies and variations in synoptic-scale eddy activity and cyclogenesis are presented. The way in which changes in the large-scale flow influence the behavior of synoptic-scale eddies and the way in which changes in eddies may feedback to influence the large-scale flow anomalies are examined. Situations characterized by differing large-scale flows are compared, showing well-defined diferences in synoptic-scale eddy activity. The net forcings of anomalous mean flows by eddies as deduced from tendency methods and E-vector analyses suggest that synoptic-scale eddies may play an important role in maintaining certain anomalous flow patterns such as blocking.

Dole, Randall M.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Persistent dust cloud activity on Mars near Echus Chasma in 1978

The Echus Chasma clouds of Mars, which are the first to be observed by spacecraft in the equatorial canyon region of the planet, extend the geographic and seasonal ranges in which dust stoms are known to occur. Viking camera observations of these clouds in red and violet filters are presently noted to imply their composition to be partly dust and partly condensate. Drainage winds, part of a diurnal wind system driven by thermal and elevation contrasts, are seen as a plausible interpretation of the observed phenomena.

Martin, Leonard J.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Robust adaptive regulation without persistent excitation

A globally convergent adaptive regulator for minimum- or nonminimum-phase systems subject to bounded disturbances and unmodeled dynamics is presented. The control strategy is designed for a particular input-output representation obtained from the state space representation of the system. The leading coefficient of the representation is the product of the observability and controllability matrices of the system. The controller scheme uses a Least-Squares identification algorithm a with dead zone. The dead zone is chosen to obtain convergence properties on the estimates and on the covariance matrix as well. This allows the definition of modified estimates which secure well-conditioned matrices in the adaptive control law. Explicit bounds on the plant output are given.

Lozano-Leal, Rogelio↗
NASA NTRS1990

The persistent coma of Comet P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1

Time-series photometry of Comet P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 in both 1987 and 1988 shows that this comet is continually active despite its large heliocentric distance. The observed activity, upon which the famous outbursts of this comet are superposed, may be driven by the sublimation of crystalline water ice at the nucleus surface. A simple model which accounts for both the continuous activity and the sporadic outbursts is suggested.

Jewitt, David↗
NASA NTRS1993

Wind persistence from 2-18 km using a wind profiler

Existing techniques for quantifying the effects of temporal wind variability on launch vehicles employ very limited sets of wind profile pairs derived from rising balloons. Variability due to spatial differences between the drifting balloon and a vehicle trajectory are traditionally ignored. The authors developed a technique to extract high quality wind profiles at frequent time intervals from a Doppler Radar Wind Profiler. This technique was applied to a limited number of data sets gathered from December 1990 through March 1992 at the Kennedy Space Center using the NASA 50 Mhz Wind Profiler. The authors then used these derived wind profiles to demonstrate techniques for quantifying the effects of temporal and spatial variability.

Wilfong, Timothy L.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Variations in synoptic-scale eddy activity during the life cycles of persistent flow anomalies

The objective of the study was to identify how synoptic-scale eddy activity varies throughout the life cycles of major scale flow anomalies. In particular, composite analyses of various measures of synoptic-scale eddy activity are constructed, with the composites obtained relative to the onset and termination times of cases typically associated with either blocking or abnormally intense zonal flows. The potential mechanisms that are likely to contribute to the observed changes in eddy behavior are discussed.

Dole, Randall M.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Mass extinctions: Persistent problems and new directions

Few contest that mass extinctions have punctuated the history of life, or that those events were so pervasive environmentally, taxonomically, and geographically that physical forcing factors were probably involved. However, consensus remains elusive on the nature of those factors, and on how a given perturbation - impact, volcanism, sea-level change, or ocean anoxic event - could actually generate the observed intensity and selectivity of biotic losses. At least two basic problems underlie these long-standing disagreements: difficulties in resolving the fine details of taxon ranges and abundances immediately prior to and after an extinction boundary and the scarcity of simple, unitary cause-and-effect relations in complex biological systems.

Jablonski, D.↗
NASA NTRS1994

The scale and persistence of soil moisture anomalies as simulated in a global model

Short term variability of climate is intimately connected with soil moisture variability. Soil moisture provides the storage and subsequent return to the atmosphere, through evaporation and transpiration, of precipitation anomalies over land. Global Circulation Model (GCM) simulations enable consistent identification of correlations and dynamical connections between the hydrologic variables, many of which are incompletely observed. One way to facilitate understanding with these increasingly intricate models is to perform sensitivity studies in which a boundary condition or process is prescribed. In this study we will report on a sensitivity study in which a GCM with a sophisticated land surface representation is used to investigate soil moisture variability in the model climate. The simulations to be used in this study were made at R15 resolution (approximately 4.5 deg latitude x 7.5 deg longitude) with prescribed sea surface temperatures (SST) in the GENESIS model (Thompson and Pollard, 1994), which is coupled to a Land Surface Transfer model (LSX) at 2 deg x 2 deg resolution (Pollard and Thompson, 1994). All the results represented here were taken from the monthly averages of the model results. The LSX model accounts for the physical effects of vegetation with two layers specified at each grid point. Vegetation attributes such as leaf area indices, fractional cover, leaf albedos, etc., were taken from the global dataset in Dorman and Sellers (1989). A six-layer soil model extends from the surface to 4.25 m depth. SST's were prescribed in two ten year experiments using monthly SST values with the daily value being interpolated from the nearest two months. In the first experiment monthly climatological values were used, and in the second, the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) observed SST's for the years 1979 through 1988 were used (Gates, 1992). Thus, the former experiment gives a measure of the intrinsic model variability, to be compared with that of the latter experiment, which includes month-to-month variability due to ocean forcing.

Fitzjarrald, D.↗
NASA NTRS1999

Relaxation from Steady States Far from Equilibrium and the Persistence of Anomalous Shock Behavior in Weakly Ionized Gases

The decay of anomalous effects on shock waves in weakly ionized gases following plasma generator extinction has been measured in the anticipation that the decay time must correlate well with the relaxation time of the mechanism responsible for the anomalous effects. When the relaxation times cannot be measured directly, they are inferred theoretically, usually assuming that the initial state is nearly in thermal equilibrium. In this paper, it is demonstrated that relaxation from any steady state far from equilibrium, including the state of a weakly ionized gas, can proceed much more slowly than arguments based on relaxation from near equilibrium states might suggest. This result justifies a more careful analysis of the relaxation times in weakly ionized gases and suggests that although the experimental measurements of relaxation times did not lead to an unambiguous conclusion, this approach to understanding the anomalous effects may warrant further investigation.

Rubinstein, Robert↗
NASA NTRS1995

The Metastable Persistence of Vapor-Deposited Amorphous Ice at Anomalously High Temperatures

Studies of the gas release, vaporization behavior and infrared (IR) spectral properties of amorphous and crystalline water ice have direct application to cometary and planetary outgassing phenomena and contribute to an understanding of the physical properties of astrophysical ices. Several investigators report anomalous phenomena related to the warming of vapor-deposited astrophysical ice analogs. However gas release, ice volatilization and IR spectral features are secondary or tertiary manifestations of ice structure or morphology. These observations are useful in mimicking the bulk physical and chemical phenomena taking place in cometary and other extraterrestrial ices but do not directly reveal the structural changes which are their root cause. The phenomenological interpretation of spectral and gas release data is probably the cause of somewhat contradictory explanations invoked to account for differences in water ice behavior in similar temperature regimes. It is the microstructure, micromorphology and microchemical heterogeneity of astrophysical ices which must be characterized if the mechanisms underlying the observed phenomena are to be understood. We have been using a modified Transmission Electron Microscope to characterize the structure of vapor-deposited astrophysical ice analogs as a function of their deposition, temperature history and composition. For the present experiments, pure water vapor is deposited at high vacuum onto a 15 K amorphous carbon film inside an Hitachi H-500H TEM. The resulting ice film (approx. 0.05 micrometers thick) is warmed at the rate of 1 K per minute and diffraction patterns are collected at 1 K intervals. These patterns are converted into radial intensity distributions which are calibrated using patterns of crystalline gold deposited on a small part of the carbon substrate. The small intensity contributed by the amorphous substrate is removed by background subtraction. The proportions of amorphous and crystalline material in each pattern are determined by subtracting a percentage of crystalline component relative to amorphous and pure crystalline endmembers. Vapor-deposited water ice undergoes two amorphous to amorphous structural transformations in the temperature range 15-130 K with important astrophysical implications. The onset of cubic crystallization occurs at 142-160 K (at 1K per minute heating rates) during which the 220 and 311 diffraction maxima appear and 0.1 micrometer crystallites can be seen in bright field images. This transition is time dependent.

Blake, David F.↗