Franz Newland - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Franz Newland
This report outlines the latest motion analysis techniques in the fields of rigid and deformable ... more This report outlines the latest motion analysis techniques in the fields of rigid and deformable object tracking and flow analysis. Particular examples are given for vehicle motion, ice and cloud tracking and ocean flow analysis. Image preprocessing and parameterisation methods are discussed in terms of whole-scene analysis, feature and object extraction and data associations. The application of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, neural networks and fuzzy logic to data extraction is also highlighted. Algorithmic similarity measures, model matching, statistical similarity analysis and neural network optimisation techniques are considered for object matching, and the application of Kalman filtering to object tracking is expounded. Where available, comparative analyses are used to highlight the benefits of each approach. Suggested approaches for the three motion types are then selected and justified from the literature, and possible future directions of research are highlighted. This report consists of a considerable literature survey of the active research areas in motion analysis, and an extensive reference list is included.
COM DEV Ltd. has recently completed a program that made use of highly responsive space solutions ... more COM DEV Ltd. has recently completed a program that made use of highly responsive space solutions to provide proof-of-concept data for an on-going project dealing with the reception of Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from space. The program, Nanosatellite Tracking of Ships (NTS), was developed to answer a number of precise questions regarding the AIS signal environment from space. This mission, based on the UTIAS/SFL CanX-2 bus, has been designed, developed and readied for flight in less than 7 months. The mission involved rapid development of a complex payload and then integrating it with a spacecraft bus that met the mission objectives. The work performed on the payload used on the NTS program was comprehensive and involved the development of a new RF design using a limited number of pre-existing components and an entirely new digital back-end. The bus design was a combination of existing UTIAS/SFL CanX-2 avionics and the Generic Nanosatellite Bus (GNB) structure. The...
Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
Engineering education is still largely offered through traditional, content-heavy approaches, wit... more Engineering education is still largely offered through traditional, content-heavy approaches, with key technical topics in individual courses separate from those that emphasize the practice of the engineering profession, resulting in fragmented student workloads. Traditional assessments do not accommodate students’ unique, diverse learning perspectives. These issues fail to recognize that engineering is above all else a community-of-practice, requiring practitioners to demonstrate innovation and resilience to address today’s complex challenges in sustainable ways. More recent programs adopt project-based pedagogies, that engage learners in engineering problems that affect their communities. This paper proposes taking the project focus further, with a structure that allows faculty and students to collaborate on real-world engineering work that is not just done for, but also with, the community, and with sustainability built in. Such an approach establishes an overarching connection b...
Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, 2015
The paper investigates the elastic, thermal, and electrical coupling effects on the dynamics and ... more The paper investigates the elastic, thermal, and electrical coupling effects on the dynamics and libration stability of flexible bare electrodynamic tethers in the end-of-mission satellite deorbit. A high-fidelity model is developed by considering transverse and longitudinal dynamics and libration dynamics of the tether and environmental effects with the latest models for atmospheric and plasma density, as well as Earth gravity and magnetic fields. The long-term orbital and libration dynamics of the tether are analyzed by a nodal position finite element method and symplectic time integration. Orbital motion limited theory is used to model the electron collection by bare electrodynamic tethers, whereas a Fowler–Nordheim equation is used for a Spindt array cathode. The thermal effect and its coupling with the dynamics of electrodynamic tethers are investigated parametrically. It is found that the thermal effect significantly affects the stability of electrodynamic tethers, which must be considered in the st...
AIAA SPACE 2011 Conference & Exposition, 2011
SpaceOps 2002 Conference, 2002
The ROSACE optical ground station provides angular measurements for geostationary satellites usin... more The ROSACE optical ground station provides angular measurements for geostationary satellites using a telescope and CCD camera to produce satellite images relative to their background star field. The satellites are followed over the CCD exposure, resulting in a moving star field. The star tracks that are thus produced are matched to a star catalogue, producing a precise mapping between CCD and reference coordinates , from which the satellite position in the image can be converted to traditional angular position measurements without requiring atmospheric correction. The station is automated for autonomous operation. A prototype station was installed at the Observatory of Haute Provence in February 2001. This paper details its performance over the first 18 months of operation, during which the station durability has been improved following modifications to address the minor problems that developed. Station operations reached a sufficient level of reliability in April 2002 to start validation campaigns and the first results are presented, achieving measurements coherent with existing ground station measurements, with a precision of 1-2 arc seconds at 1 standard deviation. Due to the nature of the measurement generation, the station is particularly suited to generating measurements for satellites in collocation and also for space debris in or near the geostationary arc, and qualitative results from campaigns on these are also presented.
Advances in Space Research, 2004
On-ground optical systems using a telescope and a CCD camera offer an effective solution to the p... more On-ground optical systems using a telescope and a CCD camera offer an effective solution to the problem of observing objects in geostationary orbit. CNES has been studying and developing such systems for several years with two main objectives: firstly to develop systems able to detect debris in the vicinity of the geostationary orbit for statistical evaluation of the population and
Acta Astronautica, 2010
The COM DEV Mission Development Group has recently launched a nanosatellite mission called NTS (N... more The COM DEV Mission Development Group has recently launched a nanosatellite mission called NTS (Nanosatellite Tracking of Ships). NTS is a space trial, intended to provide proof-of-concept validation for a COM DEV AIS (Automatic Identification System) radio that has been specifically designed to receive ship AIS transmissions from low Earth orbit. The AIS system uses the very high frequency (VHF) band and provides detailed information about each equipped vessel. Not only does this system provide information such as the location of a vessel, but it also provides heading, engine status and other crucial information about the ship. Designed for terrestrial use, the AIS system traditionally has a range of only 100 km and uses a local self-organized time-division multiple access (SO-TDMA) scheme to ensure transmissions from all ships in any selforganized cell do not overlap. Receiving these signals from a space platform presents an opportunity to provide wide area monitoring of shipping activity. Detection of AIS signals from space will provide a new capability to track and monitor large maritime vessels even when there are large distances from traditional shore based detection systems. The NTS program was designed to be a low cost demonstration satellite and provide rapid risk mitigation to assist in the development of a future constellation of spacecraft that could provide operational AIS from space (AIS-S) reception and dissemination. The scope of the NTS program was kept to a minimum with focus on the design, development and demonstration of a new payload. The nanosatellite bus was developed using a combination of pre-existing designs by the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies/Space Flight Laboratory (UTIAS/SFL). The resulting bus design was a combination of their CanX-2 and Generic Nanosatellite Bus. The NTS spacecraft is able to provide the capability to detect AIS signals from low earth orbit with multiple, short AIS signal collection cycles over its planned mission lifetime. The paper presents an overview of the NTS spacecraft, mission concept and preliminary results obtained from the flight.
Today, we live in a world of unprecedented challenges, opportunities, and complexities, where adv... more Today, we live in a world of unprecedented challenges, opportunities, and complexities, where advances in technology are transforming the very fabric of our culture, economy, and environment. Engineering education is responsible for preparing students for the unprecedented challenges, opportunities, and complexities of this emerging future. Here, we share our current perspective on the evolution needed in engineering education via a conceptual model we have developed. In particular, we highlight the need for engineers to engage in social agency over technology, which requires them to understand the social context in which they live and work, and explore the kind of ingenuity needed to create a future where technology meets society's need. We use the model to analyze a number of educational initiatives we have developed at the Lassonde School of Engineering.
ABSTRACT The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. C... more ABSTRACT The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. Current texture-based techniques for tracking clouds in sequences of satellite imagery are robust at generating global cloud motion winds, but their use as wind data makes many simplifying assumptions on the causal relationships between cloud dynamics and the underlying windfield. These can be summarised under the single assumption that clouds must act as passive tracers for the wind. The errors thus introduced are now significant in light of the improvements made to weather models and forecasting techniques since the first introduction of satellite-derived wind information in the late 1970s. In that time, the algorithms used to track cloud in satellite imagery have not changed fundamentally. There is therefore a need to address the simplifying assumptions and to adapt the nature of the analyses applied accordingly. A new approach to cloud motion analysis from satellite data is introduced in this thesis which tracks the motion of clouds at different scales, making it possible to identify and understand some of the different transport mechanisms present in clouds and remove or reduce the dependence on the simplifying assumptions. Initial work in this thesis examines the suitability of different motion analysis tools for determining the motion of the cloud content in the imagery using a fuzzy system. It then proposes tracking clouds as flexible structures to analyse the motion of the clouds themselves, and using the nature of cloud edges to identify the atmospheric flow around the structures. To produce stable structural analyses, the cloud data are initially smoothed. A novel approach using morphological operators is presented that maintains cloud edge gradients whilst maximising coherence in the smoothed data. Clouds are analysed as whole structures, providing a new measure of synoptic-scale motion. Internal dynamics of the cloud structures are analysed using medial axis transforms of the smoothed data. Tracks of medial axes provide a new measure of cloud motion at a mesoscale. The sharpness in edge gradient is used as a new measure to identify regions of atmospheric flow parallel to a cloud edge (jet flows, which cause significant underestimation in atmospheric motion under the present approach) and regions where the flow crosses the cloud boundary. The different motion characteristics displayed by the medial axis tracks and edge information provide an indication of the atmospheric flow at different scales. In addition to generating new parameters for measuring cloud and atmospheric dynamics, the approach enables weather modellers and forecasters to identify the scale of flow captured by the currently used cloud tracers (both satellite-derived and from other sources). This would allow them to select the most suitable tracers for describing the atmospheric dynamics at the scale of their model or forecast. This technique would also be suitable for any other fluid flow analysis where coherent and stable gradients persist in the flow, and where it is useful to analyse the flow dynamics at more than one scale.
There exist various methods of using ground signals collected by a satellite to determine the orb... more There exist various methods of using ground signals collected by a satellite to determine the orbit of the satellite. These signals can be used independently as a single source, or multi-source data can be fused together to increase redundancy and reliability of the orbit solution. A new measurement technique is proposed in this study, in which the location of a satellite could be computed from the knowledge of navigation data points within the satellite’s field of view (FoV). There are a growing number of ground-based sensors which broadcast their position, and which can be detected from space, providing a dense dataset for determining the position of the detecting satellite. Knowing the positions of such points, the time that they appear and remain in the FoV, it is possible to determine the satellite’s orbit. In the context of this problem, it is proposed to use ship-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) data as the ground points whose positions are known (with some uncerta...
The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling and forecasting is well fou... more The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling and forecasting is well founded. Current texture-based techniques for tracking clouds in sequences of satellite imagery are robust at generating global cloud motion winds, but their use as wind data makes many simplifying assumptions on the causal relationships between cloud dynamics and the underlying windfield. These can be summarised under the single assumption that clouds must act as passive tracers for the wind. The errors thus introduced are now significant in light of the improvements made to weather models and forecasting techniques since the first introduction of satellite-derived wind information in the late 1970s. In that time, the algorithms used to track cloud in satellite imagery have not changed fundamentally. There is therefore a need to address the simplifying assumptions and to adapt the nature of the analyses applied accordingly. A new approach to cloud motion analysis from satellite data is int...
30th AIAA International Communications Satellite System Conference (ICSSC), 2012
Over the past four years, COM DEV has been developing the AIM (Advanced Integrated Microsatellite... more Over the past four years, COM DEV has been developing the AIM (Advanced Integrated Microsatellite) satellite bus in order to address missions and user applications that can be met by a spacecraft in the 100 kg class. AIM will serve as a platform for both research and operational missions with a design that meets or exceeds the Canadian Space Agency Multi-Mission Microsatellite Bus (MMMB) requirements and has further enhancements targeted towards increasing its operational utility. A key feature of the AIM bus is the ability to accommodate various mission requirements with a flexible, modular design that distinctly separates the payload module from the bus module. The “open box” structure of the AIM bus maximizes the available mounting area for payloads and subsystems, and also allows easy access for assembly, integration and testing. The platform has an A-side/B-side configuration providing a single-fault tolerant architecture. The AIM bus has been selected as the platform for M3MSat (Maritime Monitoring and Messaging Microsatellite), a joint mission of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), and is being considered for use in a number of other missions, including the QEYSSat mission. The bus is the result of a joint collaboration between COM DEV Ltd. and the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies/Space Flight Laboratory (UTIAS/SFL). This paper describes the satellite bus and design and touches upon the ongoing M3MSat development as well as potential future missions.
AIAA SPACE and Astronautics Forum and Exposition
Progress in Canadian Mechanical Engineering. Volume 4
Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
Today’s world has an urgent need for engineer-changemakers to participate in the addressing of co... more Today’s world has an urgent need for engineer-changemakers to participate in the addressing of complex societal challenges. However, today’s Engineering Education does not provide the opportunity for students to develop the necessary skills, perspectives, and experiences to become engineer-changemakers. In this paper, we present a new model of changemaking and use this model to assess the profession of engineering, engineering education, and a number of initiatives we have created over the past year at the Lassonde Futures Lab. Using the model, we also propose a forward thinking vision for creating a “purpose-driven collaboratory” that simultaneously catalyzes change and prepares changemakers.
The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. Current te... more The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. Current texture-based techniques for tracking clouds in sequences of satellite imagery are robust at generating global cloud motion winds, but their use as wind data makes many simplifying assumptions on the causal relationships between cloud dynamics and the underlying windfield. These can be summarised under the single assumption that clouds must act as passive tracers for the wind. The errors thus introduced are now significant in light of the improvements made to weather models and forecasting techniques since the first introduction of satellite-derived wind information in the late 1970s. In that time, the algorithms used to track cloud in satellite imagery have not changed fundamentally. There is therefore a need to address the simplifying assumptions and to adapt the nature of the analyses applied accordingly. A new approach to cloud motion analysis from satellite data is introduced in this ...
This report outlines the latest motion analysis techniques in the fields of rigid and deformable ... more This report outlines the latest motion analysis techniques in the fields of rigid and deformable object tracking and flow analysis. Particular examples are given for vehicle motion, ice and cloud tracking and ocean flow analysis. Image preprocessing and parameterisation methods are discussed in terms of whole-scene analysis, feature and object extraction and data associations. The application of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, neural networks and fuzzy logic to data extraction is also highlighted. Algorithmic similarity measures, model matching, statistical similarity analysis and neural network optimisation techniques are considered for object matching, and the application of Kalman filtering to object tracking is expounded. Where available, comparative analyses are used to highlight the benefits of each approach. Suggested approaches for the three motion types are then selected and justified from the literature, and possible future directions of research are highlighted. This report consists of a considerable literature survey of the active research areas in motion analysis, and an extensive reference list is included.
COM DEV Ltd. has recently completed a program that made use of highly responsive space solutions ... more COM DEV Ltd. has recently completed a program that made use of highly responsive space solutions to provide proof-of-concept data for an on-going project dealing with the reception of Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from space. The program, Nanosatellite Tracking of Ships (NTS), was developed to answer a number of precise questions regarding the AIS signal environment from space. This mission, based on the UTIAS/SFL CanX-2 bus, has been designed, developed and readied for flight in less than 7 months. The mission involved rapid development of a complex payload and then integrating it with a spacecraft bus that met the mission objectives. The work performed on the payload used on the NTS program was comprehensive and involved the development of a new RF design using a limited number of pre-existing components and an entirely new digital back-end. The bus design was a combination of existing UTIAS/SFL CanX-2 avionics and the Generic Nanosatellite Bus (GNB) structure. The...
Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
Engineering education is still largely offered through traditional, content-heavy approaches, wit... more Engineering education is still largely offered through traditional, content-heavy approaches, with key technical topics in individual courses separate from those that emphasize the practice of the engineering profession, resulting in fragmented student workloads. Traditional assessments do not accommodate students’ unique, diverse learning perspectives. These issues fail to recognize that engineering is above all else a community-of-practice, requiring practitioners to demonstrate innovation and resilience to address today’s complex challenges in sustainable ways. More recent programs adopt project-based pedagogies, that engage learners in engineering problems that affect their communities. This paper proposes taking the project focus further, with a structure that allows faculty and students to collaborate on real-world engineering work that is not just done for, but also with, the community, and with sustainability built in. Such an approach establishes an overarching connection b...
Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, 2015
The paper investigates the elastic, thermal, and electrical coupling effects on the dynamics and ... more The paper investigates the elastic, thermal, and electrical coupling effects on the dynamics and libration stability of flexible bare electrodynamic tethers in the end-of-mission satellite deorbit. A high-fidelity model is developed by considering transverse and longitudinal dynamics and libration dynamics of the tether and environmental effects with the latest models for atmospheric and plasma density, as well as Earth gravity and magnetic fields. The long-term orbital and libration dynamics of the tether are analyzed by a nodal position finite element method and symplectic time integration. Orbital motion limited theory is used to model the electron collection by bare electrodynamic tethers, whereas a Fowler–Nordheim equation is used for a Spindt array cathode. The thermal effect and its coupling with the dynamics of electrodynamic tethers are investigated parametrically. It is found that the thermal effect significantly affects the stability of electrodynamic tethers, which must be considered in the st...
AIAA SPACE 2011 Conference & Exposition, 2011
SpaceOps 2002 Conference, 2002
The ROSACE optical ground station provides angular measurements for geostationary satellites usin... more The ROSACE optical ground station provides angular measurements for geostationary satellites using a telescope and CCD camera to produce satellite images relative to their background star field. The satellites are followed over the CCD exposure, resulting in a moving star field. The star tracks that are thus produced are matched to a star catalogue, producing a precise mapping between CCD and reference coordinates , from which the satellite position in the image can be converted to traditional angular position measurements without requiring atmospheric correction. The station is automated for autonomous operation. A prototype station was installed at the Observatory of Haute Provence in February 2001. This paper details its performance over the first 18 months of operation, during which the station durability has been improved following modifications to address the minor problems that developed. Station operations reached a sufficient level of reliability in April 2002 to start validation campaigns and the first results are presented, achieving measurements coherent with existing ground station measurements, with a precision of 1-2 arc seconds at 1 standard deviation. Due to the nature of the measurement generation, the station is particularly suited to generating measurements for satellites in collocation and also for space debris in or near the geostationary arc, and qualitative results from campaigns on these are also presented.
Advances in Space Research, 2004
On-ground optical systems using a telescope and a CCD camera offer an effective solution to the p... more On-ground optical systems using a telescope and a CCD camera offer an effective solution to the problem of observing objects in geostationary orbit. CNES has been studying and developing such systems for several years with two main objectives: firstly to develop systems able to detect debris in the vicinity of the geostationary orbit for statistical evaluation of the population and
Acta Astronautica, 2010
The COM DEV Mission Development Group has recently launched a nanosatellite mission called NTS (N... more The COM DEV Mission Development Group has recently launched a nanosatellite mission called NTS (Nanosatellite Tracking of Ships). NTS is a space trial, intended to provide proof-of-concept validation for a COM DEV AIS (Automatic Identification System) radio that has been specifically designed to receive ship AIS transmissions from low Earth orbit. The AIS system uses the very high frequency (VHF) band and provides detailed information about each equipped vessel. Not only does this system provide information such as the location of a vessel, but it also provides heading, engine status and other crucial information about the ship. Designed for terrestrial use, the AIS system traditionally has a range of only 100 km and uses a local self-organized time-division multiple access (SO-TDMA) scheme to ensure transmissions from all ships in any selforganized cell do not overlap. Receiving these signals from a space platform presents an opportunity to provide wide area monitoring of shipping activity. Detection of AIS signals from space will provide a new capability to track and monitor large maritime vessels even when there are large distances from traditional shore based detection systems. The NTS program was designed to be a low cost demonstration satellite and provide rapid risk mitigation to assist in the development of a future constellation of spacecraft that could provide operational AIS from space (AIS-S) reception and dissemination. The scope of the NTS program was kept to a minimum with focus on the design, development and demonstration of a new payload. The nanosatellite bus was developed using a combination of pre-existing designs by the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies/Space Flight Laboratory (UTIAS/SFL). The resulting bus design was a combination of their CanX-2 and Generic Nanosatellite Bus. The NTS spacecraft is able to provide the capability to detect AIS signals from low earth orbit with multiple, short AIS signal collection cycles over its planned mission lifetime. The paper presents an overview of the NTS spacecraft, mission concept and preliminary results obtained from the flight.
Today, we live in a world of unprecedented challenges, opportunities, and complexities, where adv... more Today, we live in a world of unprecedented challenges, opportunities, and complexities, where advances in technology are transforming the very fabric of our culture, economy, and environment. Engineering education is responsible for preparing students for the unprecedented challenges, opportunities, and complexities of this emerging future. Here, we share our current perspective on the evolution needed in engineering education via a conceptual model we have developed. In particular, we highlight the need for engineers to engage in social agency over technology, which requires them to understand the social context in which they live and work, and explore the kind of ingenuity needed to create a future where technology meets society's need. We use the model to analyze a number of educational initiatives we have developed at the Lassonde School of Engineering.
ABSTRACT The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. C... more ABSTRACT The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. Current texture-based techniques for tracking clouds in sequences of satellite imagery are robust at generating global cloud motion winds, but their use as wind data makes many simplifying assumptions on the causal relationships between cloud dynamics and the underlying windfield. These can be summarised under the single assumption that clouds must act as passive tracers for the wind. The errors thus introduced are now significant in light of the improvements made to weather models and forecasting techniques since the first introduction of satellite-derived wind information in the late 1970s. In that time, the algorithms used to track cloud in satellite imagery have not changed fundamentally. There is therefore a need to address the simplifying assumptions and to adapt the nature of the analyses applied accordingly. A new approach to cloud motion analysis from satellite data is introduced in this thesis which tracks the motion of clouds at different scales, making it possible to identify and understand some of the different transport mechanisms present in clouds and remove or reduce the dependence on the simplifying assumptions. Initial work in this thesis examines the suitability of different motion analysis tools for determining the motion of the cloud content in the imagery using a fuzzy system. It then proposes tracking clouds as flexible structures to analyse the motion of the clouds themselves, and using the nature of cloud edges to identify the atmospheric flow around the structures. To produce stable structural analyses, the cloud data are initially smoothed. A novel approach using morphological operators is presented that maintains cloud edge gradients whilst maximising coherence in the smoothed data. Clouds are analysed as whole structures, providing a new measure of synoptic-scale motion. Internal dynamics of the cloud structures are analysed using medial axis transforms of the smoothed data. Tracks of medial axes provide a new measure of cloud motion at a mesoscale. The sharpness in edge gradient is used as a new measure to identify regions of atmospheric flow parallel to a cloud edge (jet flows, which cause significant underestimation in atmospheric motion under the present approach) and regions where the flow crosses the cloud boundary. The different motion characteristics displayed by the medial axis tracks and edge information provide an indication of the atmospheric flow at different scales. In addition to generating new parameters for measuring cloud and atmospheric dynamics, the approach enables weather modellers and forecasters to identify the scale of flow captured by the currently used cloud tracers (both satellite-derived and from other sources). This would allow them to select the most suitable tracers for describing the atmospheric dynamics at the scale of their model or forecast. This technique would also be suitable for any other fluid flow analysis where coherent and stable gradients persist in the flow, and where it is useful to analyse the flow dynamics at more than one scale.
There exist various methods of using ground signals collected by a satellite to determine the orb... more There exist various methods of using ground signals collected by a satellite to determine the orbit of the satellite. These signals can be used independently as a single source, or multi-source data can be fused together to increase redundancy and reliability of the orbit solution. A new measurement technique is proposed in this study, in which the location of a satellite could be computed from the knowledge of navigation data points within the satellite’s field of view (FoV). There are a growing number of ground-based sensors which broadcast their position, and which can be detected from space, providing a dense dataset for determining the position of the detecting satellite. Knowing the positions of such points, the time that they appear and remain in the FoV, it is possible to determine the satellite’s orbit. In the context of this problem, it is proposed to use ship-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) data as the ground points whose positions are known (with some uncerta...
The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling and forecasting is well fou... more The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling and forecasting is well founded. Current texture-based techniques for tracking clouds in sequences of satellite imagery are robust at generating global cloud motion winds, but their use as wind data makes many simplifying assumptions on the causal relationships between cloud dynamics and the underlying windfield. These can be summarised under the single assumption that clouds must act as passive tracers for the wind. The errors thus introduced are now significant in light of the improvements made to weather models and forecasting techniques since the first introduction of satellite-derived wind information in the late 1970s. In that time, the algorithms used to track cloud in satellite imagery have not changed fundamentally. There is therefore a need to address the simplifying assumptions and to adapt the nature of the analyses applied accordingly. A new approach to cloud motion analysis from satellite data is int...
30th AIAA International Communications Satellite System Conference (ICSSC), 2012
Over the past four years, COM DEV has been developing the AIM (Advanced Integrated Microsatellite... more Over the past four years, COM DEV has been developing the AIM (Advanced Integrated Microsatellite) satellite bus in order to address missions and user applications that can be met by a spacecraft in the 100 kg class. AIM will serve as a platform for both research and operational missions with a design that meets or exceeds the Canadian Space Agency Multi-Mission Microsatellite Bus (MMMB) requirements and has further enhancements targeted towards increasing its operational utility. A key feature of the AIM bus is the ability to accommodate various mission requirements with a flexible, modular design that distinctly separates the payload module from the bus module. The “open box” structure of the AIM bus maximizes the available mounting area for payloads and subsystems, and also allows easy access for assembly, integration and testing. The platform has an A-side/B-side configuration providing a single-fault tolerant architecture. The AIM bus has been selected as the platform for M3MSat (Maritime Monitoring and Messaging Microsatellite), a joint mission of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), and is being considered for use in a number of other missions, including the QEYSSat mission. The bus is the result of a joint collaboration between COM DEV Ltd. and the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies/Space Flight Laboratory (UTIAS/SFL). This paper describes the satellite bus and design and touches upon the ongoing M3MSat development as well as potential future missions.
AIAA SPACE and Astronautics Forum and Exposition
Progress in Canadian Mechanical Engineering. Volume 4
Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
Today’s world has an urgent need for engineer-changemakers to participate in the addressing of co... more Today’s world has an urgent need for engineer-changemakers to participate in the addressing of complex societal challenges. However, today’s Engineering Education does not provide the opportunity for students to develop the necessary skills, perspectives, and experiences to become engineer-changemakers. In this paper, we present a new model of changemaking and use this model to assess the profession of engineering, engineering education, and a number of initiatives we have created over the past year at the Lassonde Futures Lab. Using the model, we also propose a forward thinking vision for creating a “purpose-driven collaboratory” that simultaneously catalyzes change and prepares changemakers.
The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. Current te... more The need for wind and atmospheric dynamics data for weather modelling is well founded. Current texture-based techniques for tracking clouds in sequences of satellite imagery are robust at generating global cloud motion winds, but their use as wind data makes many simplifying assumptions on the causal relationships between cloud dynamics and the underlying windfield. These can be summarised under the single assumption that clouds must act as passive tracers for the wind. The errors thus introduced are now significant in light of the improvements made to weather models and forecasting techniques since the first introduction of satellite-derived wind information in the late 1970s. In that time, the algorithms used to track cloud in satellite imagery have not changed fundamentally. There is therefore a need to address the simplifying assumptions and to adapt the nature of the analyses applied accordingly. A new approach to cloud motion analysis from satellite data is introduced in this ...