A natural laminar flow airfoil has been developed jointly by NASA's Dryden Flight Research and Langley Research Centers a s a part of the aircraft energy efficiency (ACEE) program. A NASA flight program incorporating this airfoil into partial wing gloves on the F-111 TACT airplane was scheduled to start in May, 1980. In support of this research effort, Boeing has conducted a n extensive boundar...

We describe the design and calibration of an external cryogenic blackbody calibrator used for the first two flights of the Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE) instrument. The calibrator consists of a microwave absorber weakly coupled to a superfluid liquid helium bath. Half-wave corrugations viewed 30° off axis reduce the return loss below −35 dB withi...

In this paper, we introduce a design criterion for motion primitives of a helicopter when engine failure occurs. A flight plan followed by such a helicopter after it has established autorotation consists of concatenation of such well-defined motion primitives. A library of primitives act as an useful finite action space for a motion planner to search over. Subject to the constrained flight dyna...

The cosmic-ray energetics and mass (CREAM) investigation is designed to measure cosmic-ray composition to the supernova energy scale of 10 eV in a series of ultra long duration balloon (ULDB) flights. The first flight is planned to be launched from Antarctica in December 2004. The goal is to observe cosmic-ray spectral features and/or abundance changes that might signify a limit to supernova ac...

The preparation of tropical wood surface sections for time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry imaging is described, and the use of delayed extraction of secondary ions and its interest for the analysis of vegetal surface are shown. The method has been applied to the study by time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry imaging with a resolution of less than one micron of a tropical woo...

This paper presents an optimal trajectory planner for a robotic batting task . The specific case of a table tennis game performed by a robot is considered. Given an estimation of the trajectory of the ball during the free flight, the method addresses the determination of the paddle configuration (pose and velocity) to return the ball at a desired position with a desired spin. The implemented al...

In brachiation, two main gaits are distinguished, ricochetal brachiation and continuous contact brachiation. During ricochetal brachiation, a flight phase exists and the body centre of mass (bCOM) describes a parabolic trajectory. For continuous contact brachiation, where at least one hand is always in contact with the substrate, we showed in an earlier paper that four step-to-step transition t...

This paper presents a bumpless hybrid supervisory control scheme for the formation of unmanned helicopters. The approach is based on the polar partitioning of the space , from which a finite bisimilar quotient transition system of the original continuous variable control system is obtained. To implement the designed hybrid supervisory control algorithm, a hierarchical control structure is intro...

The AMS spectrometer will be implemented on the International Space Station at the end of 2003 (or beginning of 2004). The instrument will be made of a superconducting magnet which inner volume will be mapped with a tracker consisting of 8 planes of silicon microstrips surrounded by several sub-detectors: a time-of-flight (TOF), a ring imaging Cherenkov (RICH), an electromagnetic calorimeter (E...

The cavity ringdown technique has been implemented for electronic spectroscopy of jet-cooled CuSi produced in a pulsed UV laser vaporization plasma reactor. A time-of-flight mass spectrometer is used to simultaneously monitor species produced in the supersonic expansion and allows correlation studies to be performed. Seven rotationally resolved vibronic bands have been measured near 400 nm, yie...