ALBERT

Description: This library is a set of subroutines designed for vector plotting to CRT's, plotters, dot matrix, and laser printers. LONGLIB subroutines are invoked by program calls similar to standard CALCOMP routines. In addition to the basic plotting routines, LONGLIB contains an extensive set of routines to allow viewport clipping, extended character sets, graphic input, shading, polar plots, and 3-D plotting with or without hidden line removal. LONGLIB capabilities include surface plots, contours, histograms, logarithm axes, world maps, and seismic plots. LONGLIB includes master subroutines, which are self-contained series of commonly used individual subroutines. When invoked, the master routine will initialize the plotting package, and will plot multiple curves, scatter plots, log plots, 3-D plots, etc. and then close the plot package, all with a single call. Supported devices include VT100 equipped with Selanar GR100 or GR100+ boards, VT125s, VT240s, VT220 equipped with Selanar SG220, Tektronix 4010/4014 or 4107/4109 and compatibles, and Graphon GO-235 terminals. Dot matrix printer output is available by using the provided raster scan conversion routines for DEC LA50, Printronix printers, and high or low resolution Trilog printers. Other output devices include QMS laser printers, Postscript compatible laser printers, and HPGL compatible plotters. The LONGLIB package includes the graphics library source code, an on-line help library, scan converter and meta file conversion programs, and command files for installing, creating, and testing the library. The latest version, 5.0, is significantly enhanced and has been made more portable. Also, the new version's meta file format has been changed and is incompatible with previous versions. A conversion utility is included to port the old meta files to the new format. Color terminal plotting has been incorporated. LONGLIB is written in FORTRAN 77 for batch or interactive execution and has been implemented on a DEC VAX series computer operating under VMS. This program was developed in 1985, and last updated in 1988.

Description: Using aircraft radar instruments designed for sea surface wave measurements, we have obtained fetch-limited directional wind wave spectra under steady off-shore wind conditions. The results from these observations in different areas at different times show that, up to a fetch of 150 km, the dominant waves propagate at an angle to the wind. The angle is near to that suggested by the Phillips resonance wind wave generation condition, but with one important difference: The waves are not always symmetric to the left and right of the wind. Most of the cases show the eventual dominance of one side lobe. The asymmetry of the wave direction relative to the wind suggests that the surface wind stress vector may not always be parallel to the mean wind direction.

Description: The NOAA National Weather Service currently derives global stratospheric wind analyses via several procedures. The first is the operational data assimilation system that extends from the surface up to about 50 mb and is in process of being tested to about 10 mb. In addition, a balanced wind is determined from the available Climate Analysis Center stratospheric height analyses that encompass the 70-0.4 mb region. The High Resolution Doppler Imager (HRDI) recently launched as a member of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is the first satellite instrument designed to measure winds in this stratospheric region and, thus, provide a basic evaluation of the NMC derived products. The HRDI accomplishes this by utilizing a triple-etalon Fabry-Perot interferometer that allows one to measure the Doppler shift of O2 absorption and emission features of the atmosphere, from which the wind field can be determined.

Description: Control of a redundant manipulator based on an impedence control framework with multiple simultaneous control sources is described. Each control source provides a different behavior type. An application is decomposed into multiple simultaneous behaviors whose resultant behavior will provide the motion necessary to execute the task. The simultaneous control inputs are merged using impedance control to compute a resultant command to the manipulator. The task space of each behavior can have the dimensionality of the mechanism being controlled. Control of a seven degree of freedom manipulator is described here with an available task space for each behavior of dimensionality seven.

Description: The kinematic design of a telerobotic mechanism for tending a plant growth space science experiment chamber is described. Ground based control of tending mechanisms internal to space science experiments will allow ground based principal investigators to interact directly with their space science experiments.

Description: Coregistered ERS-1 SAR and Scatterometer data are presented for the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. Calibrated image backscatter statistics are extracted from data acquired in regions where surface measurements were made during two extensive international Weddell Sea experiments in 1992. Changes in summer ice-surface conditions, due to temperature and wind, are shown to have a large impact on observed microwave backscatter values. Winter calibrated backscatter distributions are also investigated as a way of describing ice thickness conditions in different location during winter. Coregistered SAR and EScat data over a manned drifting ice station are used to illustrate the seasonal signature changes occurring during the fall freeze-up transition.

Description: The SeaWinds scatterometer instrument is currently being developed by NASA/JPL, as part of the NASA EOS Program, for flight on the Hapanese ADEOS II mission in 1999. This Ku-band radar scatterometer will infer surface wind speed and direction by measuring the radar normalized backscatter cross-section over several different azimuth angles. This paper presents the design characteristics of and operational approach to the instrument itself.

Description: The primary goal was to design and characterize a four-element, 20 GHz, circularly polarized microstrip patch antenna fabricated from YBa2Cu3O(x) superconductor. The purpose is to support a high temperature superconductivity flight communications experiment between the space shuttle orbiter and the ACTS satellite. This study is intended to provide information into the design, construction, and feasibility of a circularly polarized superconducting 20 GHz downlink or cross-link antenna. We have demonstrated that significant gain improvements can be realized by using superconducting materials for large corporate fed array antennas. In addition, we have shown that when constructed from superconducting materials, the efficiency, and therefore the gain, of microstrip patches increases if the substrate is not so thick that the dominant loss mechanism for the patch is radiation into the surface waves of the conductor-backed substrate. We have considered two design configurations for a superconducting 20 GHz four-element circularly polarized microstrip antenna array. The first is the Huang array that uses properly oriented and phased linearly polarized microstrip patch elements to realize a circularly polarized pattern. The second is a gap-coupled array of circularly polarized elements. In this study we determined that although the Huang array operates well on low dielectric constant substrates, its performance becomes extremely sensitive to mismatches, interelement coupling, and design imperfections for substrates with high dielectric constants. For the gap-coupled microstrip array, we were able to fabricate and test circularly polarized elements and four-element arrays on LaAlO3 using sputtered copper films. These antennas were found to perform well, with relatively good circular polarization. In addition, we realized a four-element YBa2Cu3O(x) array of the same design and measured its pattern and gain relative to a room temperature copper array. The patterns were essentially the same as that for the copper array. The measured gain of the YBCO antenna was greater than that for the room temperature copper design at temperatures below 82K, reaching a value of 3.4 dB at the lowest temperatures.

Description: This thesis studies a forward recovery strategy using checkpointing and optimistic execution in parallel and distributed systems. The approach uses replicated tasks executing on different processors for forwared recovery and checkpoint comparison for error detection. To reduce overall redundancy, this approach employs a lower static redundancy in the common error-free situation to detect error than the standard N Module Redundancy scheme (NMR) does to mask off errors. For the rare occurrence of an error, this approach uses some extra redundancy for recovery. To reduce the run-time recovery overhead, look-ahead processes are used to advance computation speculatively and a rollback process is used to produce a diagnosis for correct look-ahead processes without rollback of the whole system. Both analytical and experimental evaluation have shown that this strategy can provide a nearly error-free execution time even under faults with a lower average redundancy than NMR.