on 15-11-2010
Radio astronomy and exploration of space: six decades together
L.I. Gurvits
Head of Space Applications and Innovation
Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, Dwingeloo, The Netherlands
Over its entire history, the exploration of space is closely linked with the developments of radior rastronomy. The interaction between the realms of radio astronomy and space science and industry is mutually beneficial: at numerous occasions, technologies, methods and facilities developed in one field provided crucial support in the other one. The present status of radio astronomy links to space science and exploration is very rich. It covers a broad range of applications from cosmology to planetary science to geophysics and even fine-tuning of global navigation systems.
The next big technological step in radio astronomy, the Square Kilometre Array will provide a basis for new radio astronomy applications in space and planetary science and exploration. These include Planetary Radio Astronomy and Doppler Experiments (PRIDE) aimed at an ultra-precise characterisation of vector-states of planetary probes and other deep space craft. PRIDE measurements will address a broad range of science topics from fundamental physics to evaluation of habitability of interiors of various bodies of the Solar System. Another challenging task for ultra-sensitive radio astronomy facilities is a Direct-to-Earth (DtE) delivery of science data from planetary probes via low-power and low-gain on-board transmission systems. In both PRIDE and DtE applications, SKA and its pathfinders will be indispensible due to their frequency agility, superior sensitivity and signal processing capabilities.
In this presentation I will review the current status of radio astronomy segments of several space-borne astronomy, planetary science and exploration missions. This will include the missions scheduled for launch during the implementation phase of SKA, thus relevant to the operational period of the SKA pathfinders and technology demonstrators, especially at frequency bands below 2.5 GHz. These bands are accepted as operational for radio communication systems of several prospective Mars exploration missions (such as ExoMars and MarsNet). At higher frequency bands, a number of SKA pathfinders will play an important role in planetary missions of the coming decade targeting Mars, Venus and Mercury. I will also present the case for major ESA and NASA flagship missions to outer planets, the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) and Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) accepted for pre-evaluation studies with the target launch dates around 2020 and later. Several scientific topics of these missions can be best addressed with a wide-field SKA as an Earth-based PRIDE and DtE facility.
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on 15-11-2010
No dia 15 de Novembro de 2010 (2ª feira), das 10:00 às 12:30, decorrerá no Anfiteatro do Complexo Interdisciplinar, no Instituto Superior Técnico, um seminário sobre ''Secure Biometrics'' (http://www.img.lx.it.pt/EURASIP_Seminar/).
O programa inclui uma palestra com o título ''Secure Identity Verification'', pelo Dr. Anthony Vetro, dos Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (o abstract está abaixo).
Seguir-se-á um painel de discussão, em que participarão também a Prof. Ana Fred, do Instituto Superior Técnico, o Prof. Hugo Proença, da Universidade da Beira Interior, o Prof. Hugo Gamboa, da Plux e da FCT Universidade Nova de Lisboa e o Prof. Luís Ducla Soares, do ISCTE Instituto Universitário de Lisboa.
Biometrics are an inherent link to our identity and useful for a number of applications including access control and online transactions. Keeping this information secure is a primary concern. However, biometric data is noisy and secure matching of this data poses new security challenges. This talk will examine two approaches for secure identity verification. The first scheme considers the application of distributed source coding techniques to cope with noisy biometric measurements. A Slepian-Wolf coding system is used to provide robust biometric verification for genuine users, while guarding against attacks from imposters. A formal quantification of the tradeoff between security and robustness is provided as a function of the Slepian-Wolf coding rate. The second approach addresses the same problem with privacy-preserving protocols for secure distance computations. These protocols exploit the properties of homomorphic encryption and are developed for a variety of functions including Hamming distance, L2-norm and L1-norm. The benefits and drawbacks of these two different approaches will also be discussed.
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