Abstract: A method is presented by which a missile body roll angle relative to earth coordinates can be deciphered onboard the missile from ground-data relayed to the missile during flight The present method comprises of a horizontal pair and a vertical pair of antennas on the ground and an up-down pair and a right-left pair of antennas onboard the missile. The ground to pairs signals are sinusoidally amplitude modulated in 90° phase difference between the two pairs, causing the transmitted wave polarity to rotate in the modulation frequency. A reference pulse is transmitted from the ground whenever the wave polarity vector crosses a prescribed ground antenna direction, thereby enabling the missile to measure its body up, down, right and left directions relative to earth up, down, right and left directions and to further respectively align them together.

Abstract: A satellite constellation includes a plurality of satellites in respective polar orbits. The orbits are spaced evenly in longitude and the satellites of adjacent orbits are spaced evenly in latitude. On board each satellite is one or more sensors for monitoring activity within the satellite's field of view.

Abstract: An aircraft including a fuselage with a yaw axis, a pitch axis and a roll axis, two attitude control thrusters, fixedly connected to the fuselage to provide thrust parallel to the yaw axis, two locomotion and hover thrusters. The aircraft further includes for the locomotion and hover thruster, a mechanism for tilting the locomotion and hover thruster about a tilt axis parallel to the pitch axis to select a direction, parallel to a first plane defined by the yaw and roll axes, in which the locomotion and hover thruster provides thrust.

Abstract: An analog-to-digital converter includes a plurality of analog stages. Each stage produces, in response to analog input, a digital output that corresponds to a most significant bit of the stage's input and an analog output that corresponds to the remainder of the input. The input of each stage except the first stage is the analog output of the preceding stage.

Abstract: A color is encoded by defining the color as a triplet of Cartesian color space (e.g., RGB) (FIG. 1) coordinate values and transforming the triplet to spherical coordinates (FIG. 1) to give a transformed triplet of spherical coordinate values (FIG. 1). An image that includes a plurality of image pixels with Cartesian color space coordinate values is compressed by transforming to spherical coordinates, spatially downsampling with respect to one or more of the spherical coordinates and truncating the wordlengths of all the values of one or more of the spherical coordinates. A color image compression device includes a processor for so transforming and downsampling input image pixels.

Abstract: A method of compressing and decompressing an image, and an associated system. In an encoder, the image is partitioned among boundary pixels and interior blocks. The boundaries of the interior blocks are interpolated, preferably using dynamic programming, to produce approximation sets that are subtracted from the interior blocks to produce difference sets. The boundary pixels and the difference sets are transmitted to a decoder that interpolates the boundaries to reconstruct the approximation sets, adds the reconstructed approximation sets to the difference sets to reconstruct the interior blocks, and merges the interior blocks with the boundary pixels to reconstruct the image.

Abstract: A real time equalizer-enhancer apparatus, comprises: a plurality of analog multipliers (33) having one input (X) connected to the sampled input signal, and the other (Y) input connected to the output of an operational amplifier (34); at least one operational amplifier provided with feedback resistor (35), the output of which is connected to the input of one or more of the said plurality of analog multipliers, and the input of which is connected to one or more summing resistor, and a plurality of summing resistor; (36) connected between the output of each of the said analog multipliers (33) and the input of the operational amplifier (34); means being provided to combine the outputs of the said plurality of analog multipliers according to a predetermined combination rule, means also being provided to subtract said combination of multipliers outputs from prescribed constant bias values, and to feed the results back into the inputs of the analog multipliers (33).