Future planetary extravehicular activities (EVAs) will go beyond what was experienced during Apollo. As mission duration becomes longer, inevitably, the astronauts on the surface of the Moon and Mars will actively plan and re-plan their own sorties. To design robust decision support aids for these activities, we have to first characterize all the different types of excursions that are possible....

Beyond the Earth, the Moon is the only planetary body for which we have samples from known locations. The analysis of these samples gives us “ground-truth” for numerous remote sensing studies of the physical and chemical properties of the Moon and they are invaluable for our fundamental understanding of lunar origin and evolution. Prior to the return of the Apollo 11 samples, the Moon was thoug...

The TPF dump analyzer (TDA) was conceived in an effort to create an intelligent programming assistant for the transaction-processing facility (TPF) programming environment where IBM System/370 assembly language is used. This particular program represents the first component of the system, which provides expert advice in the domain of solving run-time control dumps (software exceptions) in the T...

Despite recent insight regarding the history and current state of the Moon from satellite sensing and analyses of limited Apollo-era seismic data, deficiencies remain in our understanding of the deep lunar interior. We reanalyzed Apollo lunar seismograms using array-processing methods to search for the presence of reflected and converted seismic energy from the core. Our results suggest the pre...

A two-chip analog micropower hearing aid circuit is developed which is based on a low voltage three micron CMOS process. The novel features of the circuit are the use of adaptive biasing of MOS Translinear Loop ( MT15 ) circuit and an innovative application of an adapiive technique in reducing the value of a degeneradng linearising resistor in the input differential stage of ,the AGC block. The...

Remote observation by the reflectance spectrometers onboard the Japanese lunar explorer Kaguya (SELENE) showed the purest anorthosite (PAN) spots (>98% plagioclase) at some large craters. Mineralogical and petrologic investigations on the feldspathic lunar meteorites, Dhofar 489 and Dhofar 911, revealed the presence of several pure anorthosite clasts. A comparison with Apollo nearside samples o...

Forty years ago, Apollo astronauts placed the first of several retroreflector arrays on the lunar surface. Their continued usefulness for laser ranging might suggest that the lunar environment does not damage optical devices. However, new laser ranging data reveal that the efficiency of the three Apollo reflector arrays is now diminished by a factor of 10 at all lunar phases and by an additiona...

The performance of modern geo-distributed database applications is increasingly dependent on remote access latencies. Systems that cache query results to bring data closer to clients are gaining popularity, but they do not dynamically learn and exploit access patterns in client workloads. We present a novel prediction framework that identifies and makes use of workload characteristics obtained ...

Recent observations of the spectral reflectivity and emissivity of the five prime Apollo landing sites are evaluated in the context of similar observations of other localities on the moon and of data returned from unmanned lunar probes. We conclude that those five sites differ significantly only in minor constituents and/or relative valence states and that those differenees are more modest than...