Publications
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What could we do with a 20-meter tower on the Lunar South Pole? Applications of the Multifunctional Expandable Lunar Lite & Tall Tower (MELLTT)
Summary
Summary
Lunar polar regions and permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are a key component of NASA's exploration objectives for the lunar surface, given their potential for a high abundance of volatiles like water. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Big Idea Challenge Team proposed the use of deployable towers to support robotic...
Discovering the smallest observed near-earth objects with the space surveillance telescope
Summary
Summary
The Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) is an advanced optical sensor designed and tested by MIT Lincoln Laboratory for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is currently in the process of being integrated into the Space Surveillance Network. By operating the telescope in a manner normally intended for the...
Development and application of spherically curved charge-coupled device imagers
Summary
Summary
Operation of a CCD imager on a curved focal surface offers advantages to flat focal planes, especially for lightweight, relatively simple optical systems. The first advantage is that the modulation transfer function can approach diffraction-limited performance for a spherical focal surface employed in large field-of-view or large-format imagers. The second...
Detecting small asteroids with the Space Surveillance Telescope
Summary
Summary
The ability of the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) to find small (2-15 m diameter) NEAs suitable for the NASA asteroid retrieval mission is investigated. Orbits from a simulated population of targetable small asteroids were propagated and observations with the SST were simulated. Different search patterns and telescope time allocation cases...
Exploring the variable sky with LINEAR. III. classification of periodic light curves
Summary
Summary
We describe the construction of a highly reliable sample of ~7000 optically faint periodic variable stars with light curves obtained by the asteroid survey LINEAR across 10,000 deg^2 of the northern sky. The majority of these variables have not been cataloged yet. The sample flux limit is several magnitudes fainter...
Characterizing the optical variability of bright blazars: variability-based selection of fermi active galactic nuclei
Summary
Summary
We investigate the use of optical photometric variability to select and identify blazars in large-scale time-domain surveys, in part to aid in the identification of blazar counterparts to the ~30% of y -ray sources in the Fermi 2FGL catalog still lacking reliable associations. Using data from the optical LINEAR asteroid...
Detecting clusters of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I. Monte Carlo comparison of cluster detection algorithms
Summary
Summary
We present a comparison of three cluster-finding algorithms from imaging data using Monte Carlo simulations of clusters embedded in a 25 deg(2) region of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging data: the matched filter (MF), the adaptive matched filter (AMF), and a color-magnitude filtered Voronoi tessellation technique (VTT). Among the...
Air Force planetary defense system: initial field test results
Summary
Summary
Over the past several years, the Air Force has been developing new devices and technology for the detection and tracking of earth orbiting satellites. This technology has been targeted to provide an upgraded capability for an operational space surveillance system called GEODSS. Currently, a number of GEODSS systems are deployed...