40 SPARC scientists from the Brewer-Dobson Circulation workshop (see summary this issue) held in Grindelwald, Switzerland, June 2012, visited the Sphinx observatory on the Jungfraujoch (3571m) in the Swiss Alps, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Sphinx is a highaltitude, international research station and hosts scientists from more than 20 different research institutions every year, investigati...

A new design for an immersive ground control station is presented that allows operators to monitor and control one or more semi-autonomous unmanned remote vehicles. This new ground station utilizes a virtual reality based visualization of the operational space and the graphical representation of multiple information streams to create a comprehensive immersive environment designed to significant...

This paper will give an overview about the Transportable Optical Ground Station (TOGS) of DLR’s Institute of Communications and Navigation. Furthermore, a short description of its project involvement will be given. OCIS codes: (060.4510) Optical communications; (200.2605) Free-space optical communication

Introduction Space systems are characterized by the huge cost induced by their design, their launch, and their maintenance. Furthermore, these systems have to satisfy more and more difficult criteria of performance or quality of service. Thus, the management of resources involved in these systems leads to specific and complex optimization problems [Hall 94, Frank 01]. There are two main kinds o...

Using GNSS observable from some stations in the Asia-Pacific area, the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) and multipath combinations of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), as well as their variations with time and/or elevation were investigated and compared with those of GPS and Galileo. Provided the same elevation, the CNR of B1 observables is the lowest among the three BDS frequencies, while ...

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 296 7 JUNE 2002 1791 concerns over China’s sales of missile systems to developing countries and its human rights record. And exports of U.S. satellites for launch on Chinese rockets—a lucrative business for China—have been more tightly controlled since the late 1990s, when a U.S. company was accused of sharing technological secrets with Chinese technicians. But NA...

Observation scheduling for Earth orbiting satellites solves the following problem: given a set of requests for images of the Earth, a set of instruments for acquiring those images distributed on a collecting of orbiting satellites, and a set of temporal and resource constraints, generate a set of assignments of instruments and viewing times to those requests that satisfy those constraints. Obse...

Multipath in Global Positioning System (GPS) is the interference of the microwave signals directly from satellites and those reflected before reaching the antenna, typically by the ground. Because reflected signals cause positioning errors, GPS antennas are designed to reduce such interference. Recent studies show that multipath could be utilized to infer the properties of the ground around the...

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is developing space robotic technologies to realize a robot to support manned space activity. JAXA plans to conduct a robot experiment to demonstrate locomotion strategy using tethers and an extendable robotic arm with a robotic hand on the International Space Station, Japanese Experiment Module Exposed Facility (JEM-EF) in fiscal year 2011. The experim...