PHLOTE Mission

PHLOTE Mission

Kevin Kempton

Phobos as a captured asteroid, early in Mars’ formation, how did it form without having a rubble body surface?

Identifying if it has water etc in it?

There are grooves on it, is it starting to get pulled apart.

A lot of talk about a precursor mission to Phobos, thoughts to go to Phobos first.

Radiation environments, dust environments, oxygen as a consumable and 85% of propellant reactions. If we can stay there, it would be a nice thing to have.

Public interest, having an eye in the sky view decomposing of Phobos, with a precursor crew.

Small body with low gravity, very close to mars, a perfect playpen for preparing L1 operations. An extended mission could be useful

The Phlote spacecraft is compromised of the main spacecraft, with subsystems, … , and a sensor sytem attached with a tether system.

Mars Observational Monitor (MOM) is the main spacecraft, mass allocation is 40kg

S-band patch antenna, tether reel and deployer, navigation lira, transceivers, solar array actuation, battery array…

Tangible launch vehicle to show a credible design. High inclination launch sight with a small bipropellant thruster to get PHLOTE past the majority of earths radiation belts.

When we do get to mars we will be going into a mapping orbit around phobos, we will need to get L1 and L2 locations identified quickly for lextended ops.

The spacecraft cannot fight periodic motion, but allowing it to go with periodic motion, and the tether system avoids use of propellant to stay in one place while mapping.

Description of drift rates

The tech making this possible are navigation doppler liar 

Op range: 6000 m 

Velocity error .2cm /sec

Range error: 23 cm.

Low gravity means low tension, like a dime on a 6m thread

How to avoid a ball of spaghetti on the tether: pretensionors.

Cold gas thrusters may minimize the impulse inanition to a spring mechanism.

Thermal expansion in the tether will also be a factor as the craft will be going into eclipse regularly

Precursor mission by 2023 for PDR, land 2026.

Data also provided for a similar application on Titan Operation Tether Experiment (TOTE), can be applicable to many others…

QA

What are your rying to do with the tether?

Allows you to sample and do observations. Stability and control. 

But you are going to land anyway?

The tether will help with a low cost mission, including after landing, having the tether.

Does the tether provide any services to the landing op? MOM to POP?

Yeah, we thought about that first, but we are moving away from that, instead above the sensor platform we are going to have such a system that is conductive, but we have an abrasive tether, it will be noncontinuous to the main space craft, allowing the craft to be reeled in and out appropriately...

What about landing in multiple spots?

SDK did not like the rough surface, so the tether won out after such an orbital analysis.

I am glad to see attention given to PHLOBOS, as the Russians, I see it as among the most valuable locations in the solar system. Why have you not mentioned the elephant of the room, that if you can anchor with the tether? You would have a space elevator. The first space elevator dynamic testing as well as a counterweight.

We want to have a low-cost dynamic mission, and the scale cannot be increased.

If we are looking at ISRU from the moon, one thing we have done is boulder grabbing. I am intrigued by the use of the system to bring a boulder back to the processor, it could eliminate the heavy propellants.

I agree because the free end of a tether is a great place to put an American flag.

I know! I can tell the Russians we worked with and they will say, ‘Isn’t that great!”

Fusion Propulsion

Presentation by Jason Cassibry, PhD, prepared by Mike Lapointe, PhD, absent

Why the interest in fusion propulsion?

Going far, getting there fast and taking lots of stuff with you

Magnetoinertail fusion

electrothermal loss, introduction of a magneto inertial field cuts down on that loss

Paths to MIF compression:

Z-pinch azithumal field

Theta pinch linear field

Liner materiaal

Equivalent view - magnetic flux implodes target

Theta pinch:

Hooves on a cylindrical piston drive the reaction into a nozzle

Replace the time-varying magnetic field with a stationary field

Induce image currents equation for production

Two stage-like gas guns that can achieve the concept are extant

Ast the pellet runs through the magnetic fuel coil, heat expands the fuel to fusion levels

Accelerator >>> pellet >>>> electromagnetic field >>>> expanding pellet

Target can be accelerated to the required velocity, simplified system helps in many ways 

Phase 1 understand the dynamics between the rapidly moving target and the gradient field

Dynamics between target and gradient field

Fuel target design

Accelerator

…

Target fuels

Deuterium Tridium, seems to be the best route, but many choices to look at

Accelerator trades

Light gas, rail guns

Electro thermal acceleration

…

Laser acceleration

Reduce compression requirements

Higher initial temperature is positive to reduce field investment.

MATLAB modeling

Numerical modeling, includes high-temperature tabulations of state, resolving vacuum charging interface, electromagnetic equation solutions..

Convergence divergence modeling to find fuel gradients.

Looking at 100 microseconds where the target comes in, you can see the density contours as the expansion occurs

Note: not a fusion model, that tried first, code-blue right away.

Payload mass delivered to Mars, preliminary field modeling of both NIAC PUFF …

Initial vehicle concept with Orion.

Developing the tools to evaluate the concept in a mission context

Analytic models to provide initial performance estimates.

Updating fusion vehicle analysis with new engine design and performance parameters…

How will it be kept cold?

We are still working on getting a target to ignite and burn, that will be phase 2

What are the power requirements and what is the power source?

For any. System we will need a battery, this has a 100 Mw nuclear reactor, especially for deep space missions.

What is the density times time target?

Looking at solid density targets, we have not settled in a loss in criteria , still working with basic models.

 Competing with laser confinement fusion?

Partially, but those need a large initial, 3 football field, power and energy requirement… we look to reduce that.

If you strip your system down and compute the energy efficiency, what fractional efficiency do you have?

We look at the kinetic energy invested into the nozzle, vs. the energy returned, but that is not what you are asking for.

It seems asymetric to use Copernicus? High-fidelity tool for a low-fidelity outcome?

That is putting the cart before the horse. Hard to do insertion with a low thrust system. Straight-liine trajectories etc… injection delta v is equal to the velocity at the destination.

What is the jet power? Specific impulse and dry mass?

10k to 30000 for the specific impulse. 200 to 300 metric tonnes. Jet power would be in the order of maybe 100 Mw but probably not that big.

How much of the fusion power hits the plume?

Temperatures get hot, and radiate in the X-ray, but 25-50% depending how large the system

OK so 20 MW of jet power in 100 tonnes?

Yes, but not certain of the number.

What is the liner made of?

We are exploring that as a parameter. This is a derivative of the PUFF concept, so a layer of uranium would give exothermic reactions and an additional boost. Other heavier elements such as lead have been considered.

Continuous electrode inertial electrostatic confinement fusion

Ray Sedwick 

Continuous electrode inertial electrostatic confinement fusion

Motivation:

Power availability as limiter to space exploration

No pressure vessel. Fusion not fission

Aneutronic shielding: no shielding

DEC direct energy conversion

Reduce mass by 4x

Fusers of the 60s

Radian acceeration of furl lions. T center, most unfortunately lost to cathode good.

The idea is to use a multi grid device, greater survivability of ions

Continuous electrode IEC

Simultaneous impact to the cathode, sloth thermalization process and this is important for aneutronic fuel.

System is highly transparent to the fusion products

Waste heat generated as a result of impact of ions and no additional radiators are necessitated forthesystem(radiators make a substantial mass of projected finished product)

C60 buckyball, each of the vertices from icosahedral, yield irregular hexagons and regular pentagons with roughly the same area

The center is where the fusion occurs… 32 channels, 16 beam lines

Aneutronic fuel

D-T lowest hanging fruit in terms of fuel

17..6 MeV >> 14.1 MeV neurtrons (low efficiency of the heat source)

So we focus on  p11 B 

Still poor thermal plasma performance, 175% bremsstrahlung losses

Possible to produce more fusion power, and is produced as alpha particles, @4MeV apiece and one around 1 MeV

Standing Wave Direct energy Converter:

Up to 90% energy extracted. Spread of energy loses more in alphas we will see.

QA

It has become clear that within the next 5-10 years something big will happen in fusion.

When will this move to phase 2?

Experimental confinement fusion elsewhere?

No.

Ions are primarily radially, hence the icasehedral design of the cofinemnet, it is a sort of geometry game to avoid some issues

A little curious if the 80% conversion efficiency is not that good? Also what about the 20% of alphas that can be very damaging floating around to existing structures?

We are perhaps naively hopeful that all alphas will leave the system, there is no entrapment in the system.

NIAC Projects 2017

Using a rover to collect nitrogen from Pluto to manufacture fuel onsite to return home:

Bioengineering a soft robot rover based on eels to explore underneath the icy surface of Europa:

A baby toy inspires a resistant and flexible rover design:

Three Distinct Antisemitic Trends in Vichy France

Paul Fischer

9/20/2017

Professor Zdatny

Marrus, Michael R. Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1981.

Word Count: 752

Three distinct antisemitic trends in Vichy France

Vichy France and the Jews is research that has been done rereading evidence, correspondence, and documents from the persecution of the Jews in France during World War II. It is worthwhile to highlight some of the critical trends of antisemitism at the time, as well as that which separates French racism from other national discriminatory natures.

Some background is provided into the history of anti-racist measures, helping to establish the surprise with which the French encountered the success of racist movements (25-71). Foremost, loi Marchandeau prohibited antisemitism in the press and had been passed shortly before the invasion. It would be replaced with the Statut des juifs, legislation updated during the war (3). In the first statute effects were primarily felt by civil servants, but as the war drew on, its goals would be expanded in revisions to include mandatory identification, property sequestration, and ultimately death for all Jews in Occupied France. Other empirical restrictions on the activities of Jewish communities included race-exclusive leagues such as l’Ordre des Médecins established August 10, 1940 that effectively excluded Jews from medical practice (160). A similar measure was taken shortly afterwards for lawyers.

Reconciliation of trending French sympathies for the Allies that grew through the war and simultaneously increasing sanctioned persecution of the Jews can be difficult (201, 210). Three examples are useful in addressing this: that of Theodore Dannecker, SS judenreferat, of Xavier Vallat, Commissioner-General of the Jewish Question (CGJQ), and of Ambassador Otto Abetz.

Upon arrival August 12, 1940, Theodore Dannecker, a young officer of the SS, was tasked with bringing the “‘gut antisemitism’ - a visceral hatred undisciplined by reason, patriotism, or a sense of public order” of Germany to France (89). At the time, this proved complicated; even the Marshall Pétain had friends in his inner circle that he wished to ensure were exempted from early legislation (207). Dozens of property crimes and other violence had been directed against Jews in the countryside of France before German invasion, to be sure, but officially these had been hitherto rightly viewed as illegal acts (34, 182). The nature of these crimes were personal rather than organized, and did not near the level of the atrocities experienced during the war. Marrus and Paxton even point to the irony that legislation preventing refugees from getting jobs or obtaining worthwhile occupations created the very conditions of criminality that they were explicitly charged with preventing.

The invasion of France also saw antisemitism drift into the sphere of politics and diplomacy. For one powerful figure, the Ambassador Abetz, “antisemitism [was] one of the levers to replace the reactionary grip of the Church and Army in Vichy France by a popular, anticlerical, pro-European … mass-movement” (78). The use of antisemitism as a tangent factor in contingent political battles directed mass opinion in a manner uncharacteristic of the liberal or communist antisemitism extant in France before occupation.

Xavier Vallat was the Commissioner-General of Jewish Questions in France. Original enthusiasm led to his public admission that “aryanization had produced an unleashing of greed’” (156). He “proclaimed himself a champion of ‘state antisemitism,’ the regulation of Jewish existence by state agencies for the benefit of all Frenchmen” (89). The position was offensive to the Germans, though not entirely out of step with the general strategies that they employed, because the French created the position independently of Germany and without forewarning. While for some, it could be seen as a way of heading off some of the more strict German rules for Jews, it also behaved more harshly towards certain groups of Jews as well (83). Arguably, it is the deviation from German guidelines that may have led to his dismissal.

The successor of Vallat, Louis Darquier, would be a complete contradiction in terms to the first Commisioner-General. With three arrests, he took the level of antisemitism to another level (283). By the time he was appointed in 1942, Laval had taken office and persecution of the Jews already well outside the legal bounds of French sovereignty, began to escalate well out of all legal and moral bounds (251). While the Germans influenced Vichy France greatly, it is a tragedy that such a high level of complicity existed, and co-operation was present even outside of the specifically antisemitic departments, “it was not the PQJ who conducted the arrests and guarded the trains, but regular police” (294).

Technics of France in Crisis: Two Defeats in Strange Defeat

Paul Fischer

9/18/2017

Professor Zdatny

Bloch, Marc. Strange defeat: A statement of evidence written in 1940. No. 371. WW Norton & Company, New York, 1968.

France in Crisis: Two Defeats in Strange Defeat

At the time Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat, France had lost territory and its political status was reduced to that of a puppet empire. 1940 was a dark year, and the coming years would force the French to lose hope in the goodness of their national Marseilles, motto, or constituent ideals as a competent force for good. The technics of war, from the point of view of a supply line Intelligence officer creates a distinct prism of analysis for historians that appropriately conveys the logistical predecessors of contingent and subsequent complete defeat at the hands of the Germans. That is, the two intertwining communications stressed in this book are the military losses during the rapid advance of Nazi Germany through France and the cultural capitulation spreading throughout France and the Allies like a disease under the stress of starvation, hardship, and absence of adequate leadership.

The importance of the Maginot line cannot be stressed enough in French plans. Like the Titanic, a great ship so formidably designed no one thought to include life boats except for cosmetic purposes, the French investment in concrete believed to stop a German incursion substituted for proper evacuation and withdrawal plans (52). The French hoped to avoid a war with Germany first through diplomatic means and if all else failed to repulse her by utilization of near limitless resources invested soundly in the same mechanics of warfare found in the First World War.

Germany correctly anticipated the French attachment to a static defensive structure (73). Engines had grown in size, and motorized transports, armored divisions, and even motorcycles traversed the countryside, sowing uncontrollable panic without even confronting the fortifications of the military (51). Bloch hypothesizes that if such an outcome were possible there may have been a path to victory in this early war with full and vigorous retreats to bring the French military together and to make a unified assault on German targets (40). Improper planning led to isolated units, without water or other necessary supplies, that Bloch was personally acquainted with as an officer of the fuel depots (38).

Hitler met with psychologists in the development of the Blitzkrieg in order to ensure that the war would exert the maximum effect on civilian and military populations possible. Mechanical means were used to boost the screech of dive-bombers, for example (54).  The Battle of London showed the Luftwaffe capable of a good deal more than was deployed into France. The French likely would have required more than simple modifications to withdrawals to counter German invasion forces, should such an outcome be conceivable without dramatically changing the fundamental makeup of the French Army. Only half of the battle was lost on the field, however.

By the conclusion of military operations dramatic social class differences in France were extant, and the occupiers sought to exploit these as liberators or bringers of a new form of government: the tyrant or dictator. In the process of authoritarianism, the French would lose hope in their national Marseilles (138). For the first time, the Germans began to fail. Where the military had instilled fear in the mind of France, appropriately enough, intelligence operatives from Germany were thugs. Improper targets were chased, and fifth columnists inappropriately exploited, becoming one of the targets of blame (25). As a consequence, the Resistance lived on.

At the time Marc Bloch wrote, the France that De Gaulle described in London was a fairy tale. Even among the regular French population, “the Germany of Hitler aroused certain sympathies the Germany of Ebert could never have hoped to appeal” and the war seemed lost for the French people as well as the military (150). To Bloch, the political right had sold out to fascists and vassalized France while detracting their political opponents as warmongers. These were elements of a social class conflict with the bourgeoisie as their target. They had “refused to take the masses seriously, or they trembled before their implied threat. What they did not realize was that, by so doing, they were separating themselves effectively from France” (167).

One Thousand Pieces of a National Drama in the Unfree French

Paul Fischer

9/10/2017

Professor Zdatny

One Thousand Pieces of a National Drama in The Unfree French

Contemporary historians struggle to piece together the dramatic events that unfolded in France during the German occupation of World War II. There are a number of grounded facts that make analysis difficult, even contradictory, in practice. Ranging from former occupation to censorship such empirically founded agents of complexity are disambiguated in The Unfree French by Richard Vinen from the distinctly political and deliberate upheaval of institutions, persons, and property in France that occurred. Rather than dwelling on the tragedies in the course of war or the jubilation of victory and resistance, Vinen successfully navigates the integral developments through the war making a perplexing narrative tangible to modern historians.

The presence and widespread impact of prisoners of war in Germany and France blurs the lines between these two narratives; a political narrative was initiated in the hearts of every Frenchman, and stuck in the gut of the Frenchwoman as well (373-5). Uncertainty became a critical theme in this narrative early in the war, and though “it was probably in the bitter cold of January of 1941 that most prisoners finally accepted there was not going to be a large scale release” and that no orders to escape existed as for British soldiers, massive numbers managed to escape from early internment camps (157). On the countryside, both the confusion and the determination to serve France manifested in the panic of the exode.

While a popular film depicting the era, The Last Metro, includes a dialogue in which a woman refuses the implications of an agent of the censor by excusing herself as non-political to which he replies, “but you are wrong, everything is political,” the integral nature of politics to the era is matched by social considerations. Integrity of cached events deliberated through subsequent hunting is best reflected by the opinions of the survivors: “French people recalled the period in terms of what happened to them and those around them, the idea that these multitudes of individual dramas were part of a broader national drama only developed later” (16). The Unfree French succeeds in bringing this social collection of considerable import to political immediacy.

Intractability of the course of action of Vichy France cannot be dismissed as in the words of Bénoit-Méchin “the crowd possesses no organ for thought. Victim of its mental hallucinations and its nervous reactions, it is without defence against rumours and delirious dreams” (94). As much as silence defined the government of Pétain, and the subsequent Pétainism that dominated the colonies, circumstance dictated the actions of the individual French (31, 75). This occurred heroically, as one woman pinned a yellow star to her dog and others donned the symbol in protest though “gentiles who wore the yellow star were often themselves in some doubt about the precise significance of their act” (140). Even Marshall Pétain used the murky nature of the Franco-German occupation in a manner bordering on heroism, declaring to the Germans “if it would take you five days to invade France, it would take me five minutes to deliver my colonies and ships to Great Britain” (81).

The tale is not only one of gangsters and murder, of treaties and betrayal. There is also the final defeat of Germany, and the restoration of France. With the exception of some of the bourgeouisie, almost none found German occupation preferable to the Allied invasion: “Where the Germans had been systematically ruthless with the population, the Allies were confused and tactless” (331). Exposing the system of agents, censorship, and oppression that were in play in occupied territories through World War II helps an understanding of the formal initiation of military operations and of the subsequent blood bath to be formulated. 250,000 Gypsies in France were killed, as were 75,000 Jews. While death camp activity was lower among French citizens than many parts of Europe, and “Vichy aimed to exclude Jews from public life rather than to kill,” foreign born Jews in France suffered near complete extermination, and the highest kill rates of any civilian population in Europe was seen there (136).