The AFRL Scholars Program: a STEM-based summer internship initiative

Collision Probability with Gaussian Mixture Orbit Uncertainty

The High Altitude Balloon Experiment (HABE) is being developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Space Vehicle Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, to investigate technologies needed to perform acquisition, tracking, and pointing (ATP) functions against boosting missiles in near-space environments. HABE is designed to demonstrate ATP sequence steps that start with acquisition of a missile plume, transition through passive IR tracking of the plume, and handover to precision tracking, which employs an active laser illuminator and imaging camera to image and track the missile nose. The Inertial Pseudo Star Reference Unit provides inertially stabilized line-of-sights (LOSs) for the illuminator laser, active fine track camera, and the marker scoring. The latter serves to measure and score the payload's pointing performance. The payload will be operated and carried aloft under a large, scientific balloon. The engagement parameters and timelines for the HABE ATP payload are consistent with scenarios encountered in space-based missile defense applications. In HABE experiments, target missiles will pass at ranges from 50 to 200 km. The performance goals of the ATP payload's LOS stabilization and marker laser pointing are required to exceed 1 microradian RMS or better in jitter, drift, and accuracy (two-axis, one sigma metrics), a requirement which stresses testing capabilities.

: The Department of the Air Force has completed an Environmental Assessment (EA) of the potential environmental consequences of the construction of a campus for training pararescue (PJ, [formerly parajumper]) candidates and Combat Rescue Officers (CROs) at Kirtland Air Force Base (AFB). The EA is incorporated by reference and this Finding of No Significant Impact summarizes the results of the evaluation of the Proposed Action. The new PJ/CRO Campus would be located on 57 acres within the southeast quadrant of the present Zia Park housing area. The housing in Zia Park, bounded by Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Gibson, and Hardin Blvds. at the western edge of the developed portion of Kirtland AFB, is scheduled to begin in Spring and Summer 2006. Seven main facilities are proposed for the PJ/CRO Campus.

Application of Systems Engineering to USAF Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate is actively pursuing cryocooler and cryogenic integration research to support technology needs for the Air Force, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA, formerly the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization), and the Department of Defense (DoD). This paper presents an overview of the in-house and external applied research efforts on a number of fundamental issues toward the development of long-life strategic cryocoolers and cryogenic integration technology. External activities include Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) development, AFRL funded activities at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and funded research at Oxford University. In house research efforts include work on advanced regenerators for Stirling cycle cryocoolers, and continued in-house research on products from the SBIR program. Additionally, this paper examines future research trends for AF and DoD cryogenic technology.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Laser Division faces the unique challenge of explaining intricate technical problems in its research portfolio to a varied audience, ranging from upper military leadership in control of program funding to young elementary students involved in STEM outreach activities. A team of Lieutenants from Kirtland Air Force Base developed an innovative solution to this challenge with a series of tabletop demos used to visually illustrate some of the key technical challenges and fundamental science the lab is working on. The negative effects of vibration on a laser system is a visually apparent problem and thus jitter was the focus of our first demo. The demo uses a Line-of-Sight Stabilization system to stabilize a vibrating laser beam. This paper will discuss the system design, implementation of the control loop, presentation techniques, and opportunities for expansion. This demo boasts a unique ability to speak to all ages, making it easier to explain key concepts to military leadership at the Pentagon as well as expose students across the USA to STEM challenges. This system is also one of a two-part set. The other, focusing on Adaptive Optics, is discussed in a sister paper.

Thin-film solar cells offer great promise for increasing the capability of future spacecraft. While their efficiencies are low compared to state of the art crystalline solar cells, they have unique attributes that make them very attractive for space use. These attributes include flexibility, low mass, and low cost production. The attractive attributes of thin-film solar cells will go untapped until space environmental effects on them are well understood. Therefore, on-orbit testing of thin-film solar cells, coupled with ground testing, is needed to provide the data to determine space environmental effects. In response to the need to perform on-orbit testing of thin-film solar cells, the Space Vehicles Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is preparing two flight experiments. The first will be on the AFRL Roadrunner Mission (Experimental Solar Array) and the second will be on the AFRL Deployable Structures Experiment (Thin-Film Photovoltaics Experiment).

Psychiatrist Soars in Rewarding Air Force Career

Mass spectrometry is a versatile research tool that has proved to be extremely useful for exploring the fundamental nature of the earth's atmosphere and ionosphere and in helping to solve operational problems facing the Air Force and the Department of Defense. In the past 40 years, our research group at the Air Force Research Laboratory has flown quadrupole mass spectrometers of many designs on nearly 100 sounding rockets, nine satellites, three Space Shuttles and many missions of high-altitude research aircraft and balloons. We have also used our instruments in ground-based investigations of rocket and jet engine exhaust, combustion chemistry and microwave breakdown chemistry. This paper is a review of the instrumentation and techniques needed for space research, a summary of the results from many of the experiments, and an introduction to the broad field of atmospheric and space mass spectrometry in general.

BANQUET ADDRESS:

Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for Airborne Laser Program at Kirtland Air Force Base (AFB) and White Sands Missile Range/Holloman AFB, NM, and Edwards AFB and Vandenberg AFB, CA

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) funded the Boundary Layer Turbulence Flight Experiment in Memory of Mike Holden (BOLT II) to better understand and quantify natural and forced boundary-layer transition and turbulence in hypersonic flight regimes for a complex, three-dimensional geometry. Texas A&M University and CUBRC led the mission and vehicle design along with critical support from AFRL and NASA. The experimental flight launched from NASA Wallops on a two-stage suborbital sounding rocket on March 21st, 2022. A detailed overview of the vehicle design, over 400 instrumentation channels, and integration work is presented in this paper. Additionally, this is the first known time that a full-scale hypersonic flight vehicle has been tested in a wind tunnel before flight. The flight computers and key instruments worked and responded well during the short ground-test campaign and detailed results are reported here with comparisons to the flight data for both the natural transition experiment, side A, and the tripped experiment, side B.

Mobile programs can potentially be malicious. To protect itself, a host that receives such mobile programs from an untrusted party or via an untrusted network connection will want some kind of guarantee that the mobile code is not about to cause any damage. The traditional solution to this problem has been verification, by which the receiving host examines the mobile program to discover all its actions even before starting execution. Unfortunately, aside from consuming computing resources in itself, verification inhibits traditional compiler optimizations, making such verifiable mobile code much less efficient than native code. We have found an alternative solution by identifying a class of mobile-code representations in which malicious programs can simply not be encoded to begin with. In such an encoding, verification turns into an integral part of the decoding routine. Moreover, support for high-quality justin-time code generation can be provided. We present two such encodings, one based on highly effective compression of abstract syntax trees, and another based on a referencesafe and type-safe variant of Static Single Assignment form. Parts of this material were previously published under the title “Project transPROse: Reconciling Mobile-Code Security With Execution Efficiency” in The Second DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exhibition (DISCEX II), Anaheim, California, June 2001, IEEE Computer Society Press, ISBN 0-7695-1212-7, pp. II.196–II.210. This research effort was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Air Force Materiel Command, USAF, under agreement number F30602-99-1-0536. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of DARPA, AFRL, or the U.S. Government.

The University of Florida, Electronic Communications Laboratory (ECL), as part of a project with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), is investigating the utility of ground penetrating radar (GPR) for airfield evaluations. It is expected that the GPR and the results of current research will assist the Air Force in assessing airfields with less coring and allow more rapid and accurate airfield evaluations by providing continuous estimates of the pavement and subsurface conditions. AFRL has conducted airfield measurements using a high-resolution GPR mounted on a test van. Using time domain data from a pair of ground-coupled antennas, one in bistatic mode and the other in monostatic mode, the thickness of pavement and other subsurface layers can be estimated. In order for GPR to be useful for airfield evaluations, practical considerations such as automated data processing capability and efficient data analysis procedures have also been addressed. This paper will describe novel approaches and signal processing techniques developed for detecting layer interface boundaries and estimating the layer properties using GPR. In addition, the software tools developed to facilitate airfield evaluations will be discussed. Finally, surface layer thickness estimates will be compared to measured cores from a recent airfield assessment.

Military antenna design using simple and competent genetic algorithms