High-efficiency, 200-W Ku-band traveling-wave tubes for satellite communications downlinks
L-3 Communications Electron Technologies (L-3 ETI) has recently tested a unit from the production family of Ku-band TWTs, the 88151HXR S/N 110, up to 200-W RF output power in thermal vacuum. Performance data and thermal analysis from the testing will be presented.
Space radiation environment impacts on high power amplifiers and solar cells on-board geostationary communications satellites
Communications satellite operators maintain archives of component telemetry to monitor system function. Operators generally do not typically use the telemetry data for scientific analysis of the space radiation environment effects on component anomalies or performance. We partnered with four geostationary (GEO) operators, acquired >1 million hours of telemetry, and combined these data with space weather observations to investigate relationships between space weather and hardware performance. We focused on the effects of space weather on two component types: solar cells and high power amplifiers. For solar cells, by augmenting >20 years of GEO telemetry with separate GEO space weather measurements, we calculated both on-orbit degradation of Si and GaAs solar cells in an annual average sense, and also quantified the degradation of cells during severe solar proton events (SPEs) of 10 MeV protons > 10,000 pfu. A functional relationship between the amount of degradation and proton fluence is also considered. We used the calculated degradation to evaluate several combinations of space weather environment models with solar cell degradation models and found that predicted performance is within 1% of the observed degradation. These models had not previously been validated using multiple on-orbit GEO datasets. We did not find a model pairing that consistently outperformed the others over all of the datasets. For high power amplifiers, through the use of statistical analysis, simulations, and electron beam experiments we conducted a root-cause analysis of solid state power amplifier (SSPA) anomalies on-board eight GEO satellites. From the statistical analysis, we identified that the occurrence of anomalies was not random with respect to the space weather environment, but that there appeared to be a relationship to highenergy electron fluence for periods of time between 10 – 21 days before the anomalies.
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.