Background
The Advanced Space Vision System images objects with cooperative targets and uses the known positions of the targets to triangulate their exact relative positions in real time. The targets are composed of thin films of silicon dioxide layered with inconel to form an inconel interference stack. A stack like this has nearly no reflectivity in the Electromagnetic spectrum. The result is a black color that appears even blacker than the flattest black paint. In photos the disks look like small black dots, and a minimum of three are needed, so they are quite unobtrusive on most payloads.
Read more about this topic: Advanced Space Vision System
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)