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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.
D. G. Gritton, D. J. Christie, R. W. Holloway, B. T. Merritt, J. A. Oicles, K. Whitham, R. B. Wilcox
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 955-960
Inertial Confinement Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22982
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Novette is a large, two beam, two wavelength laser facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Novette laser projected performance exceeds that of the 20 arm Shiva laser and the frequency multiplying capability provides more efficient target interaction. Novette is comprised of two arms of the Nova laser. New designs allow these two arms to exceed the performance of the 20 arms of Shiva. Assembling these two arms on an accelerated schedule allowed the experimental program to continue with minimum interruption. The laser has been operational since January 1983. More efficient laser amplifiers allowed the performance to be achieved with half the capacitor bank used on Shiva. The pulse power for Novette uses high-density capacitors, instrumented dual ignitron switches, 100 KVA power supplies and a control system based on LSI/11 Front End Processors (FEP's) and fiberoptic links. The bank contains 11 MJ of stored energy at 22 KV. Construction of the pulse power system took a year. The laser was completed in about 15 months. This paper is a summary of the pulse power systems for Novette; the flashlamp power system, the pulsers for the various optical shutters and the pulse power control system.