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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
J. P. Graves, I. T. Chapman, S. Coda, T. Johnson, M. Lennholm, J. I. Paley, O. Sauter, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 539-548
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11695
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Important advances have been made recently in the invention and application of experimental methods to control the sawtooth instability in tokamak plasmas. The primary means of control involves the application of either ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH), or electron cyclotron heating, with resonance very close to the q = 1 radius in the plasma core. Reported here are experiments that have successfully applied these methods to either shorten or lengthen the sawteeth deliberately, in a variety of plasma conditions, in three tokamaks: Joint European Torus (JET), TCV, and Tore Supra. It is shown that despite the sensitivity of the sawtooth period to the resonance position, sawteeth can be controlled using either real-time control of the electron cyclotron deposition, or in the case of ion cyclotron heating, very careful adjustment of the magnetic field strength and minority ion concentration. The latter technique has been guided by theoretical advances that have enabled the control of sawteeth in JET with ITER-relevant ICRH scenarios.