NARSS BEECHCRAFT superking-200 aircraft is a twin turboprops aircraft. The engines are manufactured by Pratt & Whitney of Canada. The maximum cruise speed of the aircraft is 535 km/h with max range of 3.334 km and a certified ceiling of 10.668 meters. The wingspan is 16.61 meter, the max airplane length is 13.36 meter, and the max tail height 4.52 meters. The internal cabin dimensions are (LxWxH = 5.08x1.37x1.45m).
The airplane is equipped with an IGI navigation system with Omni-star support to obtain high accuracy of the scanned laser measurements and to minimize the possibility of having gaps between scanned flight strips. The swath of a scanned laser strip ranges from 140 to 280 meters at flight altitudes of 600 to 1200 meters.
The aircraft is equipped with two cameras:

• ZEISS-RMK-TOP-15 aerial photography camera. This camera uses Kodak roll films of width 9.5” (23.75 cm).
• TOPOSYS airborne laser scanning system. The system has a Falcon II laser scanner and an accompanying TOPOSYS digital camera.

NARSS receiving station has been installed at Aswan in Upper Egypt (1000 Km south of Cairo), Egypt. The station is manufactured and installed by the American company (L3-Datron Titan) and is designed to receive images from the American satellite (Landsat), the French satellite (Spot-4) and the European radar satellite (ERS). The station is being upgraded to receive the downlink from the Egyptian satellite (Egyptsat-1).The position of the station is located at Aswan to cover entire Egypt, the Nile basin, most Arabian countries, most Africa and south Europe. The station consists of two parts; one at Aswan for receiving the images in raw format and the other at Cairo for archiving and processing of the data in standard levels.
Products:

• Spot multispectral 20 meter resolution .
• Spot panchromatic 10 meter resolution .
• Spot stereo pair 10 meter resolution

NARSS BEECHCRAFT superking-200 aircraft is equipped with a TOPOSYS airborne laser scanning system. The system has a Falcon II laser scanner and an accompanying TOPOSYS digital camera. The laser scanner-digital camera system uses differential GPS and INS (inertial navigation system) and performs GPS/INS measured data fusion by applying to APPLANIX navigation software to improve the accuracy of the laser scanner measurements.
The airplane is equipped with an IGI navigation system with Omni-star support to obtain high accuracy of the scanned laser measurements and to minimize the possibility of having gaps between scanned flight strips. The swath of a scanned laser strip ranges from 140 to 280 meters at flight altitudes of 600 to 1200 meters.
The TOPOSYS system on the BEECHCRAFT conducts 5 elevation measurements per square meters. This provides a digital surface model (DSM) that includes man-made features and vegetation superimposed on the terrain with 1 meter resolution. The system measurement accuracy is 15 cm in the vertical direction and 50 cm in the horizontal direction. The digital camera associated with the TOPOSYS system provides digital aerial photographs of 50 cm resolution. The DSM provided by the TOPOSYS system can be processed to eliminate the man-made features and vegetation to derive the associated DEM.
Falcon II is an opto-electronic LIDAR system (Light Detection And Ranging) developed by TopoSys for three-dimensional data acquisition of the earth’s surface. The measuring method for generating digital elevation models is based on active distance measurement by means of a laserscanner and is complemented by GPS positional determination and inertial navigation system. In parallel with this, a passive RGB/NIR line scanner has been integrated for the direct generation of the digital RGB and CIR true ortho images.
The Falcon II design is based on expertise of many years’ standing in the development and practical operation of the LIDAR TopoSys I and has been optimized for the rough service conditions in aircraft and helicopters.
Falcon II comprises essentially three units:

• Sensor rack .
• Computer rack .
• Operator console .

The RMK TOP features a modular design. The individual components form logical functional units optimized to the needs of practical application use. Special consideration has been given to the space available in the aircraft, the installation conditions and the necessity of component change. Highlights:

• High-performance lenses with internal filters.
• Image motion compensation by FMC and gyro-stabilized suspension mount
• Stabilized camera axis ensuring small nadir angles.
• Pulsed rotating-disk shutter with a constant access time of 50 ms .
• Overlap control and pin-point photography .
• Menu-driven central control by a compact computer and logging of the mission data.
• Automatic v/h measurement for overlap control and FMC.
• Automatic exposure control using the principle of image quality priority .
• Integration into the GPS-supported WinMP photoflight management system .

Image motion caused by the forward motion of the aircraft is eliminated by FMC devices (forward motion compensation). The Camera is equ8ipped with a T-AS gyro-stabilized suspension mount. Stabilization combined with improved vertical alignment of the camera gives the user more scope for action during the photo flight. Highlights:

• Use of high-resolution, low-speed b/w and color films .
• Complete elimination of image motion .
• possibility of missions in rough flight conditions .
• greater overlap accuracy and higher accuracy in pinpoint photography .
• increased range of flying altitude and photo scale .
• increased usage of camera and aircraft .

NARSS HRPT (High Resolution Picture Transmission) receiving station has been installed at NARSS headquarters in Cairo, Egypt to receive images from American polar orbiting weather satellites controlled by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). There are two instrument onboard NOAA satellites; AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution radiometer) whose purpose is to give information (reflectance or temperature) on different types of surfaces (sea, vegetation, ice, snow), or on cloud cover (top) and ATOVS (Advanced TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder) sounding system with IR (HIRS) and microwaves (MSU/AMSU/MHS), which is dedicated to measurements of the atmospheric vertical structures. NARSS HRPT processing lab is using AAPP (ATOVS and AVHRR Processing Package) and IAPP (International ATOVS Processing Package) to get the following products

 

The laboratory is intended for testing and debugging of electronic and optical devices. Type of Measurements:

1- Checking of the quality of images formed in the electro-optical complex (OEC) in visible and infrared spectral ranges including:.

Checking geometrical parameters of optical system (focal length,.....etc).

• Checking correspondence of wave aberrations to the calculated requirements of the design documentation and forecast of optical-physical parameters of the image quality).
• Checking image quality on the basis of optical-physical parameters at normal and varying temperature and atmospheric conditions.).
• Simulation and diagnostics for tests of (OEC) (point source with specified energy and spectrum characteristics, the translation of sources in the field of view, background of sources of thermal actions).

2- Checking the light characteristics of OEC including:.

• Measurement of indexes of spectral transmission in the center and over field).
• Measurement of indexes of the dispersion in the center and over the field.)
• Measurement of illumination distributions over the field).
• Measurement of the vignatting coefficient).
• Measurement of the effective area of the entrance pupil).
• Measurement of the degrees of radiation polarization in the optical system.
• Measurement of the rejection ratio of an un-axial exposure.
• Determination of the dependence between the signal of the optical-electronic channel and the input spectral energy action.

3-Measuring parameters of an IR scanner (IR radiometer) including:.

• Testing of objective quality.
• Measurement of parameters of photo-receiving units.
• Testing of scanner assembly quality.
• Checking of sensitivity and accuracy of scanners.
• Simulation of conditions for estimation of image quality and try-out of target detection algorithms.

4-Automated Measurements of tested optical device parameters including:.

• Averaged aberrations.
• Distortion over the field of view.
• Spatial resolution over the field of view.
• Penetration capacity (transmission factor).

Blue Gene ranks on the TOP500 list1 along with three other entries in the top 10.

The IBM® System Blue Gene® Solution is the result of an IBM supercomputing project dedicated to building a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today’s high performance systems.

Blue Gene is also extremely efficient. Because of unique design points that allow dense packaging of processors, memory and interconnect, power and floor space consumption.

NARSS Blue Gene/L contains one rack:

·         Compute nodes (Dual processor; 1024 per rack)

·         Processor (PowerPC 440 700MHz; two per node)

·         Memory (512 MB SDRAM-DDR per node)

·         Operating Systems (Compute Node – Lightweight proprietary kernel, I/O Node – Embedded Linux, Front End and Service Nodes – SuSE SLES 9 Linux)

·         Peak performance per rack – 5.73 TFlops

To make an application fit on Blue Gene/L it should be

·         Coded in C, C++, or FORTRAN with MPI for communication.

·         Single threaded applications

·         32-bit Application addressing

·         MPI version is MPICH v1.2

·         SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data)

·         MPI task requiring memory less than 500 MB

·         Floating point-intensive code

Current applications running on NARSS Blue Gene/L

·         Climate Modeling (WRF Model)

·          Affects of Mobile on Human Brain

Egyptian Space Program

* Enabling Egypt to join the Space Technology Age through designing and manufacturing small satellites. * Transfer of advanced space technologies in communication, computers, programs, optics, sensors, new materials, command and control and energy to the Egyptian Scientific community. * Utilizing of space technologies & applications in development plans. * Acquiring national capabilities in Space Technology disciplines. * Establishment of scientific & industrial base in advanced technology fields. * Building human resource capabilities for space sciences fields. * Coordinating and enhancing the cooperation between the research & industrial centers and space program through a national project. * o EgyptSat_1 Satellite is the first Egyptian experimental satellite for remote sensing. o The satellite has an image resolution of 8 meters, which is satisfactory for many important civilian applications. The satellite can capture a vertical image for any location in Egypt once over 75 days. It also can be titled to capture images for location at both sides of satellite path, capture 3-D images, or re-capture images for location within periods less than 16 days. o The space payload for the satellite includes a 4 spectrum optical camera for various applications, an infrared camera and communication device for store and forward transmissions.