Search

This article proposes a novel two-staged trajectory planning algorithm toward the cooperative visual coverage of multiple asteroid sites with the utilization of multiple spacecraft. The objective of the novel established planning scheme is to determine an observation tour for each spacecraft and the associated fuel optimal trajectories, such that each site of interest is observed only once during the entire mission. The completion of the observation task of an asteroid site is limited to the observation time window, referred as the period for which a site is illuminated by the Sun. The proposed planning algorithm divides the overall multi-site coverage problem into a nonlinear and integer optimization problem as: (i) a single target optimization and (ii) a multi-target multiple spacecraft optimal sequencing problem. The first part aims to generate fuel optimal trajectories, for all the initial-final imaging site location pairs. In the second part, the problem of distributing the observation task, among the fleet of spacecraft, is addressed by designing a feasible tour to observe a subset of the desired asteroid sites, for each spacecraft, while considering their individual fuel capacity. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in multiple simulation scenarios and while considering different asteroids., Validerad;2021;Nivå 2;2021-11-30 (johcin);Funder: Rymd för Innovation och Tillväxt (RIT)

On 4 November 2016, the Day of National Unity, a statue dedicated to Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev, was unveiled in Moscow near the Kremlin, in the presence of political leaders as well as Patriarch Kirill and representatives of many other religious denominations. Three short speeches were given, each of which promoted a conservative agenda: the first by President Vladimir Putin, the second by Patriarch Kirill, and the third by Nataliia Solzhenitsyna, the widow of the Nobel laureate. Some months later, the Vladimir theme was echoed in director Andrei Kravchuk’s feature film The Viking, based on the life and deeds of the grand prince. Both the inauguration of the statue and the release of the film were belated events connected to the millennium of Vladimir’s death in the year 2015. My task in this paper will be to study the dedication of this statue from the point of view of conservatism. I understand conservatism in the same broad sense as Elena Chebankova, who uses the following collective definition of Russian conservatism drawn from a number of different authors: This thought is preoccupied with the ways of weaving the eternal concepts and morals into the fabric of the contemporary, future-focused world. In doing so, conservatives divorce the past from the eternal by selecting those transcendental values of previous ages that they wish to take to the future. In other words, Russian conservatism seeks to recreate tradition in a new form.1Conservatism has a moral function of preserving eternal values, but also carries the political implications of employing such values in society and governance.

More than 700 'utopian' novels are published in Russia every year. These utopias – meaning here fantasy fiction, science fiction, space operas or alternative history – do not set out merely to titillate; instead they express very real Russian anxieties: be they territorial right-sizing, loss of imperial status or turning into a 'colony' of the West. Contributors to this innovative collection use these narratives to re-examine post-Soviet Russian political culture and identity. Interrogating the intersections of politics, ideologies and fantasies, chapters draw together the highbrow literary mainstream (authors such as Vladimir Sorokin), mass literature for entertainment and individuals who bridge the gap between fiction writers and intellectuals or ideologists (Aleksandr Prokhanov, for example, the editor-in-chief of Russia's far-right newspaper Zavtra). In the process The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia sheds crucial light onto a variety of debates – including the rise of nationalism, right-wing populism, imperial revanchism, the complicated presence of religion in the public sphere, the function of language – and is important reading for anyone interested in the heightened importance of ideas, myths, alternative histories and conspiracy theories in Russia today.

The article presents a close reading of Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Monolog dla Kasandry”, "Soliloquy for Cassandra". The view of Cassandra as expressed by the poet is compared with the corresponding motifs in Miłosz and more generally with examples from Polish and Eastern European literature and cultural history. It is argued that Szymborska does not agree with the common and traditional Polish image of Cassandra, but instead polemizes against it in a complex and contradictory manner.

Crop growth simulation models can differ greatly in their treatment of key processes and hence in their response to environmental conditions. Here, we used an ensemble of 26 process-based wheat models applied at sites across a European transect to compare their sensitivity to changes in temperature (−2 to +9°C) and precipitation (−50 to +50%). Model results were analysed by plotting them as impact response surfaces (IRSs), classifying the IRS patterns of individual model simulations, describing these classes and analysing factors that may explain the major differences in model responses. The model ensemble was used to simulate yields of winter and spring wheat at four sites in Finland, Germany and Spain. Results were plotted as IRSs that show changes in yields relative to the baseline with respect to temperature and precipitation. IRSs of 30-year means and selected extreme years were classified using two approaches describing their pattern. The expert diagnostic approach (EDA) combines two aspects of IRS patterns: location of the maximum yield (nine classes) and strength of the yield response with respect to climate (four classes), resulting in a total of 36 combined classes defined using criteria pre-specified by experts. The statistical diagnostic approach (SDA) groups IRSs by comparing their pattern and magnitude, without attempting to interpret these features. It applies a hierarchical clustering method, grouping response patterns using a distance metric that combines the spatial correlation and Euclidian distance between IRS pairs. The two approaches were used to investigate whether different patterns of yield response could be related to different properties of the crop models, specifically their genealogy, calibration and process description. Although no single model property across a large model ensemble was found to explain the integrated yield response to temperature and precipitation perturbations, the application of the EDA and SDA approaches revealed th

The art action that has attracted by far the most attention in Russia in recent years is Petr Pavlenskii's Threat, which was performed in November 2015. Pavlenskii stands out as the next step after Pussy Riot in the evolution of Russian art. Pavlenskii himself mentions Chris Burden, who died in 2015, as a source of inspiration. Pavlenskii's most recent performance took place on 9 November 2015, when he took himself to the Lubyanka, headquarters of the Russian Federal Security Service and former KGB, lit petrol he had poured on one of its wooden doors and posed for a photograph holding the empty petrol can. A video clip was also made of the action and of Pavlenskii's arrest. The prominent contemporary Russian gallery owner and curator Marat Gelman called the work The Door to Hell, alluding to both Dante's Divine Comedy and the important symbolism of doors in the Russian Orthodox Church.