Re: Engine Last Day On Earth
Brandi Baylon
Lets start with the sad truth: It had been a month and a half since I last flew the RV-10. Meanwhile, my husband, the builder, had installed a radical new update to the Grand Rapids Technologies Avionics Horizon I EFIS boxes, and figured out how to get them to fly laterally coupled approaches with the autopilot, in both synthetic approach and ILS/LOC mode.
I know, I know, who wants to do that? Why bother when it is easy enough to drive the airplane right onto the white line extending from the runway centerline on the multifunction display (MFD) and fly the classic ILS needles to the decision altitude and look up?
Youd also think wed be content to see the autopilot fly the beautifully programmed flight plans, rounding the corners, and wed thrill watching the lines on the MFD flip from white to magenta on each leg. Surely wed be giddy to be able to pull up and then fly a SID (standard instrument departure) out of busy Class B airspace with a click and a button push, or to execute a GPS approach to a satellite airport with the best fuel in the area without fumbling at the boxes.
The flight instructor in me should have known better. The combination of rushing and a caffeine-free frontal cortex left me at 65% power, 178 knots and 3000 feet headed west (over open water, fortunately) with my copilot/builder (also a flight instructor) shouting, Turn the autopilot on, slow down and make some decisions-NOW!
We put in the Grand Rapids Horizon I boxes so that wed have a capable IFR aircraft for those times when we need one. But it is only so if the pilots are capable of flying it IFR properly, and that means I have to learn every possible way my new machine can ply the airspace I fly through, and learn each procedure well.
Amy Laboda holds an Airline Transport rating, multi-engine and single-engine flight instructor ratings, and glider and rotorcraft (gyroplane) ratings. She and her husband live in Florida, along with two daughters, and recently finished building a Vans RV-10.
NASA's asteroid-hopping Lucy spacecraft is on its way back to Earth for a Christmas-time rendezvous this year, before continuing its mission to investigate space rocks left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
The long journey home for Lucy began when it performed the largest blast of its main engine planned for its entire 12-year mission. The spacecraft, which launched in October 2021, fired its main engines on Saturday (Feb. 3) for more than 36 minutes. The operation followed the first blast of Lucy's main engines on Jan. 31, which lasted for just 6 minutes.
The aim of the two engine firings, which will have exhausted over half of Lucy's onboard fuel, is to shift the probe from its current orbit, which skims the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, into one that will bring it to the vicinity of Jupiter. That latter path will allow Lucy to become the first spacecraft to visit the Trojan asteroids, which share an orbit with the gas giant around the sun.
The combined maneuver altered Lucy's velocity by around 2,000 mph (3,200 kph) and put it on course back toward Earth. Previously, the spacecraft had only fired its secondary thrusters to perform maneuvers that changed its velocity by no more than around 10 mph (16 mph).
Lucy's visit to Earth in December 2024 won't be a social one. It will be vital in sending the spacecraft on to the Trojan asteroids, which are divided into two populations: the Greek camp, which is ahead of Jupiter in its orbit of the sun, and the Trojan camp, which trails the gas giant.
With half of Lucy's fuel gone, the spacecraft will get a boost from Earth to help it reach these never-before-visited asteroids. This will be the second gravity assist that the spacecraft has received from Earth since its space mission began.
Following this, Lucy's next asteroid encounter will be with the Trojan family asteroid Eurybates and its satellite or 'moonlet' Queta in August 2027. The spacecraft will then visit four more asteroids, three of which are also double systems, allowing it to sight three more moonlets.
December 2024 will not mark the NASA spacecraft's last visit to Earth. Lucy will get a final gravity assist from our planet in 2031, which will help it reach the large binary asteroids Patroclus and Menoetius in March 2033, which will be the final year of its prime mission.
When you purchase equipment, you want to know how long you can expect it to last. The average lifespan of construction equipment varies from machine to machine, and many factors will influence how long its components continue to work.
Another significant effect on wheel loaders is the layout of the job site. Steep slopes, for instance, can negatively influence the component lifecycle. Try to optimize the job site for your equipment.
Forklifts are one of those tools that has electric variants. If used in a clean, indoor environment, these electric forklifts are likely to last longer, but keep in mind that their batteries will only last a certain number of charges before they need replacement. They also can see more wear if you use them outdoors. Rough outdoor climates and poor maintenance can shorten the usable hours of a forklift.
Many contractors end up taking hydraulic excavators out of primary production at about 9,800 hours of use. By the time an excavator reaches that number, most components, aside from the engine, have seen some sort of major repair or replacement. Mini-excavators typically offer a similar average lifespan of around 10,000 hours.
The motor grader is similar to scrapers in that there is little risk to push it past its anticipated B50 component life, which is about 12,000 hours. At 20,000 hours, 20% of motor graders still stand in primary production.
Again, the undercarriage is a significant consideration when looking at wear and tear. Operating conditions will determine how long a crawler loader will last, but general contractors are often looking at about 6,000-7,000 hours for the average track loader lifespan before requiring a rebuild. Rebuilds for the engine and hydraulic system might be necessary at about 10,000-12,000 hours.
Working with Thompson Tractor offers detailed histories, testing, and Cat Certified Used products you can trust to maintain the performance of a new machine. Plus, when you buy Cat machines from Thompson Tractor, you are buying a machine backed by the Caterpillar brand. That means long-lasting quality and exceptional resale value.
Earth Engine scripts are stored in Git repositories hosted by Google. You can browse all repositories to which you have access by going to earthengine.googlesource.com, or browse repositories that you own by going to earthengine.googlesource.com/users/USERNAME.
Since Earth Engine repositories can be accessed using Git, you can easily download repositories from Earth Engine, manage and edit your scripts outside the Code Editor, and then push the scripts back into Earth Engine again.
Git is an open source distributed version control system. It is how Earth Engine maintains a full version history of all scripts and repositories so users are able to compare or revert scripts to an older version.
Outside of the Code Editor, using Git to work on scripts also allows for non-linear workflows on multiple branches so different users can work on separate copies of the code, then merge and push it back into the remote repository in Earth Engine.
One thing to note is that Git is not able to parse folders within an Earth Engine repository, so ensure that all your scripts are in the root repository and that there are no folders in there before attempting to clone the repository.
In the earlier Reflectance preprocessing tutorial, we showed how to read in a band of data containing weather quality information and apply cloud-masking using that band. In this tutorial, we will show you a more simplified way of doing this, using functions so we can more easily apply that operation to an Image Collection. This is called "refactoring". In any coding language, if you notice you are writing very similar lines of code repeatedly, it may be an opportunity to create a function. For example, in the previous tutorial, we repeated lines of code to pull in different years of data at SRER, the only difference being the year and the variable names for each year. As you become more proficient with GEE coding, it is good practice to start writing functions to make your scripts more readable and reproducible.
Let's get started! First let's take a look at the syntax for writing user-defined functions in GEE. If you are familiar with other programming languages, this should look somewhat familiar. The function requires input argument(s) args and returns an output.
For the next example, we will write a function to add a Map Layer for each Image in an Image collection. We'll provide the full script below, including the function addNISImage, with comments explaining what each part of the function does. Note that a helpful troubleshooting technique is to add in print statements if you are unsure what the code is returning. We have included some commented-out print statements in the function, which show the outputs (which would show up in the console tab).
For a little more detail on how this function was applied, refer to this GIS Stack Exchange Post: Add/display all images of my collection in google earth engine. When writing your own GEE code, the Google earth-engine developers pages may not always have an example of what you are trying to do, so stack overflow can be a valuable resource.
Next we can build upon this function to include some small pre-processing steps, such as selecting the Weather_Quality_Indicator band, plotting it, and masking the SDR data to include only the clear-weather (
This figure shows the weather quality information at SOAP in 2019, where the data were collected in mixed cloud conditions. Flight operators prioritize flying the area over NEON plots in the best weather conditions when possible. As explained in the previous lesson, when working with AOP reflectance data, the weather conditions during the flights are one of the most important quality considerations.
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