U-2 Aircraft Research Articles

Behind the Inscrutable Half-Shell: Images of Mutant Japanese and Ninja Turtles

Anti-Asian sentiment, and specifically Japan-bashing has a long, established history in the film industry. Though the early twentieth-century silent films such as Heathen and the Sunday School Teachers (1904) and Chinese Laundry (1904) directed racial hatred toward immigrants in America, these films also worked to demean other groups of Asians, notably the Japanese, who were then immigrating in numbers that far exceeded those of the Chinese, the population in America having been essentially exterminated by the U.S. government's first Exclusion Act in 1882. For example, the 1908 production of Peril - in which a servant disrupts a household, is thrown from a window, beaten by a policeman, and set on fire - provided, in the words of Eugene Franklin Wong: an oblique indication of increasingly serious immigration and racial problems between the United States and the rising Empire of Japan, with the thematically filling the role of scapegoat.(1) Partly because of the invasion of America by of Japanese immigrants, and partly because of japan's military expansionism (namely its annexation of Korea in 1904 and its defeat of Russia in 1905), the Japanese began to replace Chinamen as America's Yellow a threat to everything Americans hold dear. Later, reacting racially to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the American film industry - in tandem with the U.S. government - further focused its anti-Asian sentiment on the Japanese through the production of films. During a time when Japanese-American actors and actresses were being herded for internment, the movie studios pumped up production of manifestly anti-Asiatic racist material, revising earlier villains to fit the context of war. The props - (non-Japanese) extras - graduated from playing the masses of huddled, silently suffering (and dying) peasants to playing hordes of insect-like, fanatic (and dying) Kamikaze pilots. The starring Asian roles went to white actors and actresses in yellow face who played Fu Man Chu and Dragon ladies in Japanese drag as Samurai-style warmongers and geishas. The evil villains of pre-war films were easily transformed into the evil Japanese villains of WWII films, since all Asians look alike, especially considering how many of the same actors portrayed both Japanese and characters. The films, then, essentially perpetuated the old fear of Peril, now manifested in the Japanese enemy who - perhaps disguised as farmer or fisherman competing (unfairly) for white America's resources - sought to undermine national security and morality from the inside. The genre succeeded in providing Hollywood with a dominant paradigm, still invoked today, to portray Japanese and American relations; many recent films - such as Gung Ho (1986) Black Rain (1989), Captured Hearts (1990) - that explicitly deal with Japanese and American interaction - are framed in the context of and battle.(2) For example, while World War II is the obvious backdrop of Captured Hearts, the war in Black Rain is drug related, with the Japanese Yakuza overthrowing the Italian Mafia as the new mob in America [just as the (good) Japanese character Mas replaces the Latino Charlie as Nick Conklin's - the motorcycle-cowboy - (white) cop's ethnic sidekick]. In Gung Ho the war between the Americans and Japanese is economic, related specifically to car manufacture. Here, even though the American auto workers are employed by the Japanese, whom they have asked to buy the factory, the American workers talk in terms of us and them, of competition between two opposing teams. In addition, both Gung Ho and Black Rain refer to the original war, WWII, as the source of prevailing tensions between the Americans and Japanese. In Gung Ho, when the tension between the Japanese management and the American workers climaxes in a fight between Hunt and Kazihiro (Kaz), Hunt is fired and retaliates by saying, If you're so great, how'd you lose the big one? …

A Comparison of the Optical Pulse Characteristics of Intracloud and Cloud-to-Ground Lightning as Observed above Clouds

The optical-pulse characteristics of intracloud (IC) and cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flashes were investigated. The time-resolved optical waveforms at 777.4 nm and electric-field changes produced by lightning flashes were measured aboard a U2 aircraft flying above clouds at the same time that ground-based lightning measurements were carried out. The pulse shapes and intensities of IC and CG flashes, as viewed from above cloud, were found to exhibit remarkably similar waveshapes, radiances, and radiant energy densities. The median radiance at cloud top was found to be about 0.007 W/sq m per sr, and the median energy density about 0.000003 J/sq m per sr.

Calibration of the Solar Channels of the NOAA-9 AVHRR Using High Altitude Aircraft Measurements

A method for calibrating satellite radiometers is investigated. A calibrated spectral radiometer carried aboard a U2 aircraft at an altitude of 60 000 ft was aligned with White Sands. New Mexico along the same view vector as the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on the NOAA-9 spacecraft at the time of the spacecraft's overpass on 26 August 1985. Both sets of data have been transformed into best estimates of the radiance at satellite altitude inside the footprint of the aircraft radiometer, allowing an estimate of radiance calibration changes in the AVHRR to be made. It is assumed that both instrument systems are linear, that the spectral response function of AVHRR has not changed from its prelaunch value, and that the zero radiance responses of both instruments are accurately known. Extrapolation of the radiances measured from the aircraft to those expected at satellite altitude is achieved by modeling the experimental conditions at White Sands and calculating the ratio of radiances at the two altitudes through the LOWTRAN VI computer program. Results from data taken within 2 minutes either side of the satellite overpass indicate a 98.9% correlation between the two sets of data, and a change in gain relative to the prelaunch calibration of +2 ± 5% for channel 1 and −2 ± 5% for channel 2 of the NOAA-9 AVHRR. Analysis of other coincident data for the NOAA-9 AVHRR and the aircraft spectral radiometer, including a large dataset from October and November 1986, is now in progress and will establish the day-to-day repeatability of results using this method.

Laser microprobe study of carbon in interplanetary dust particles (IDP)

Interplanetary dust particles (IDP's) have been collected routinely for over 12 years at high altitudes (20 km) by NASA's U2 aircraft. Collected materials have been characterized as meteoritic (~70%), contaminants (~30%), and IDP's. The latter group are dissimilar to known meteorites groups and are possible comet particles, as their populations increase after cometary meteor showers. Many of the IDP's that are less than 30 ~m is size are fluffy, porous aggregates of micron to submicron grains that consist essentially of olivine, pyroxene, sulfide, magnetite or NiFe, embedded in carbonaceous material. Other particles contain phyllosilicates, which give evidence of interactions with water, and exotic components [i]. Preliminary microprobe-SEM measurements indicate carbon contents of 2 to 15 wt%. If we assume that some of the IDP's are primitive materials, then we can learn first hand about conditions in the early solar system. Primordial matter may also be present, which wo~id afford us the opportunity to examine presolar system dust. The presence of carbonaceous material in these particles could yield unique information pertaining to carbon, and possibly organic chemistry. Meteorites also contain carbonaceous matter, but appear to have sustained secondary alteration events. The major problems with obtaining suitable information from IDP's is their small grain size, low abundance, and their variable characteristics from sample to sample. Clearly, new instrumental techniques must be carefully implemented to gather meaningful data. A technique which shows great promise in this respect is Lase< Ionization Mass Spectrometry (LIMS). LIMS, described in detail by Simons [2], employs a pulsed UV laser to produce nearly instantaneous (N2xl0 -8 s) vaporization and ionization of materials, followed by acceleration and time-of-flight analysis of the ions produced. LIMS provides a survey technique, with nearly simultaneous acquisition of mass spectra covering the entire elemental range. Results bearing on the two issues of quantitative microanaly-

The Dragon, the Lady, and the Dragon Lady in Book I of The Faerie Queene

The Dragon, the Lady, and the Dragon Lady in Book I of The Faerie Queene

The response of stratospheric constituents to a solar eclipse, sunrise, and sunset

The combination of measurements and detailed stratospheric modeling of time‐dependent events can be used to confirm chemical mechanisms and their laboratory rate constants or to deduce additional atmospheric properties such as the temperature structure. Sunset, sunrise, and a solar eclipse are events that are characterized by a relatively strong forcing function of brief duration. For these time scales, the detailed time‐dependent photochemical and vertical diffusion equations can be solved to predict the variations of minor constituents that are physically important and accessible to current measurement techniques. Careful simultaneous solutions of these equations have shown a significant daytime variation of ozone down to altitudes of about 30 km that can affect the interpretation of spectral absorption type experiments. The calculated sunset variations of [NO] and [HO] show a log linear concentration decay for limited time periods that can be readily converted into atmospheric temperatures by using known reaction rates up to about 70‐km altitude. Measurements of the time‐dependent behavior of [NO] and [NO2] during the eclipse of February 26, 1979, are expected to be made from the U2 aircraft at 20‐km altitude. If the measurements have sufficient sensitivity, they can be used along with the model predictions to confirm some laboratory chemical rate constants and to estimate the [ClO]/[ClNO3] ratio at 20‐km altitude.