Assessment of thruster induced contamination of critical surfaces is the important and necessary stage of International Space Station (ISS) component design. Plume contamination models aimed at the prediction of the spatial distribution of contaminant mass fluxes have been developed in the recent years for various ISS thrusters based on vacuum chamber and space flight experiments and empirical ...

1. Individual variation in contaminant levels is a common occurrence in many toxicology studies, but the exact cause is often unclear. We investigated the influence of diet and breeding location on individual bird contaminant profiles using a colour-marked population of American dippers Cinclus mexicanus . The population comprised two distinct groups within a single river system: resident dippe...

We develop an algorithm for estimating parameters of a distribution sampled with contamination. We employ a statistical technique known as “expectation maximization” (EM). Given models for both member and contaminant populations, the EM algorithm iteratively evaluates the membership probability of each discrete data point, then uses those probabilities to update parameter estimates for member a...

This paper introduces a new direct method for measuring water and contaminant fluxes in porous media. The method uses a passive flux meter (PFM), which is essentially a self-contained permeable unit properly sized to fit tightly in a screened well or boring. The meter is designed to accommodate a mixed medium of hydrophobic and/or hydrophilic permeable sorbents, which retain dissolved organic/i...