The National Aeronautics and Space Administration maintains a challenging schedule of planned and on-going space exploration missions that extend to the outer reaches of our galaxy. New missions represent a huge investment, in terms of actual costs for equipment and support infrastructure, and personnel training. The success of a mission is critical considering both the monetary investment, and for manned missions, the lives which are put at risk. Tragedies involving Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 7, and the near tragedy of Apollo 13 exemplify that space exploration is a dangerous endeavor, posing extreme environmental conditions on both equipment and personnel. NASA, the National Science Foundation' and numerous independent researchers indicate that predictive simulations have the potential to decrease risk and increase efficiency and effectiveness in space exploration activity. Simulations provide the capability to conduct planning and rehearsal of missions, allowing risk reducing designs and techniques to be discovered and tested. Real-time simulations may improve the quality of the response in a real-time crisis situation. The US Army developed Layered Terrain Format (LTF) database is a uniquely architected database approach that provides high fidelity representation of terrain and specialized terrain query functions that are optimized to support real-time simulations. This dissertation investigates the question; can the unique LTF database architecture be applied to the general problem of celestial body representation? And if so, what benefits might it bring for mission planners and personnel executing the mission? Due to data limitations, this research investigates these questions through a lunar analog setting iv involving S band and Earth-bound communication signals as might be needed to conduct manned and/or robotic mission on the moon. The target terrain data set includes portions of the Black Point Lava Flow in Arizona which will be used for NASA's 2010 Desert RATS analog studies. Applied Research Associates Inc, the developer of the LTF product, generated Black Point databases and made limited modifications to the LTF Viewer tool, RAVEN, which is used for visualization of the database. Through the results attained during this research it is concluded that LTF product does provide a useful simulation capability which could be used by mission personnel both in pre-mission planning and during mission execution. Additionally, LTF is shown to have application an information system, allowing geospecific data of interest to the mission to be implemented within its layers. The Florida Space Research & Education Grant Program sponsored by FSGC, Space Florida and UCF provided a grant of $31,500 to perform this research.

The purpose of this thesis has been to prepare a group interpretation script based on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its major manned programs. The script is designed to inform high school students and the general public of the space program. Available literature on oral interpretation and readers theatre have been investigated with particular attention given to the value of readers theatre as a means of instruction. Questionnaires were circulated among aerospace professors throughout the country and companies involved in the space industry. In their responses, aerospace company officials indicate strong support of this thesis and indicate a pressing need for such an informative script.

The Outer Space Treaty established the obligation to provide continuing supervision of its national space activities by the appropriate state. The implementation of this obligation remains a matter of state discretion. Since this Treaty came into force the world has evolved to become reliant on space based utilities to enable the global economy and state governance. Today, space faring states are increasingly dependent upon the supervision practices of other states to assure its space interests as the attribution of state responsibility becomes more difficult to ascribe. / Therefore, the absence of binding supervision standards may become an impediment to future space applications due to three identified trends. First, the trend towards space commercialization requires active state supervision. Second, the rise in environmental hazards requires minimal safety standards to decrease the harmful effects on space applications. Third, space security requires identification of intentional acts and prudent measures to safeguard vital space applications.

No description available.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

With the goal to continue interplanetary exploration and search for past or existent life on Mars, software and hardware for unmanned subsurface drills are being developed. Unlike drilling on Earth, interplanetary exploration drills operate with very low available power and require on-board integrated health monitoring systems, with quick-response recovery procedures, under complete autonomous operations. As many drilling faults are not known a priori, Earth-based direction and control of an unmanned interplanetary drilling operation is not practical. Such missions also require advanced robotic systems that are more susceptible to structural and mechanical failures, which motivates a need for structural health monitoring techniques relevant to interplanetary exploration systems. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a process of detecting damage or other types of defects in structural and mechanical systems that have the potential to adversely affect the current or future performance of these systems. Strict requirements for interplanetary drilling missions create unique research problems and challenges compared with SHM procedures and techniques developed to date. These challenges include implementing sensors and devices that do not interfere with the drilling operation, producing "real-time" diagnostics of the drilling condition, and developing an automation procedure for complete autonomous operations. Thus, the completed thesis work presents basic research leading to the dynamic analysis of rotating structures with specific application to interplanetary subsurface drill systems, and the formulation of an autonomous, real-time, dynamics-based SHM technique for drilling applications. This includes modeling and validating the structural dynamic system, with and without damage or faults, for a prototype interplanetary subsurface drill, exploring the use of Laser Doppler Velocimeter sensors for use in real-time SHM, developing signal filters to remove inherent harmonic components from the dynamic signal of rotating structures, developing an automation procedure with the associated software, and validating the SHM system through laboratory experiments and field tests. The automated dynamics-based structural health monitoring technique developed in this thesis presents advanced research accomplishments leading to real-time, autonomous SHM, and it has been validated on an operating dynamic system in laboratory and field tests. The formulated SHM and drilling operation also met or exceeded all specified requirements. Other major contributions of this thesis work include the formulation and demonstration of real-time, autonomous SHM in rotating structures using Laser Doppler Velocimeter sensors.