admin Engineers prepare the MESSENGER spacecraft for a vibration test at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., where the Mercury-bound NASA spacecraft was designed and built. * * * Introduction Flight configured spacecraft are subjected to base input vibration tests for certain programs.… Read more
N571UP, the aircraft involved, seen taking off from Dubai in November 2008 * * * A UPS Boeing 747-400 flying between Dubai International Airport and Cologne Bonn Airport crashed close to Dubai airport, killing the two crew members, on September 3, 2010. The aircraft had… Read more
I may have an upcoming opportunity to perform signal processing on some satellite data for tracking storms and ocean wave heights… Anyway, I am studying some radar books in preparation. * * * Here are some Matlab scripts for monostatic pulsed radar systems: target_range.zip -… Read more
Matlab GUIDE is a package for generating graphical user interface (GUI) scripts. Extracting Numerical Data from a Matlab uitable The table format was set to text using the Table Property Editor. The number of rows is equal to N. There are three columns of data: peak,… Read more
Matlab has very good plotting capabilities, but the required command syntax is somewhat awkward. Here is a hopefully user-friendly GUI for plotting XY curves from array data. The data must have two columns. Typical applications would be for a time history or frequency response function.… Read more
Gnuplot is a portable command-line driven graphing utility for Linux, OS/2, MS Windows, OSX, VMS, and many other platforms. The source code is copyrighted but freely distributed (i.e., you don’t have to pay for it). It was originally created to allow scientists and students to… Read more
Alas, the water drainage pipes in my home have developed a singing sound with a frequency of 400 Hz. This is slightly above a G note on the musical scale. The singing occurs when someone has finished taking a shower on the second floor. Here… Read more
Here is a project that my NASA colleagues have been working on: FSC_damper.pdf The original goal of the project was to use the Ares I second stage as a LOX damper to mitigate the first stage thrust oscillation. See also: http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/Constellation.blog/posts/post_1239311627391.html – Tom Irvine
The Craig-Bampton method is method for reducing the size of a finite element model, particularly where two or more subsystems are connected. It combines the motion of boundary points with modes of the subsystem assuming the boundary points are held fixed. Here is a tutorial… Read more
