Daily News Briefs

Digital Infrared Imaging (DII), an Orlando, Fla., maker of thermal imaging systems, said it 23 nuclear facilities across the US, including all of Florida's sites, to provide protection against security threats. The company said much of the work was done in the past year. A federal mandate gave nuclear facilities until Oct. 29 to enhance their site security. . . . Harris Corp. announced that Andrew Clark, president of its Maritime Communication Services (MCS) subsidiary, has accepted a one-year assignment with Ocean.US, a program to design, deploy and operate the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). Ocean.US was established as part of the US Oceans Act of 2000 and is sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. The IOOS will be an ocean and coastal observing and prediction system similar in function to the National Weather Service; it will gather information from a variety of land-, air-, water- and space-based sensors. Clark will continue to provide executive oversight to MCS and will serve in an advisory capacity to Harris throughout the temporary assignment. . . . Optical Research Associates (ORA) announced it has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant from NASA to develop software for optical design. ORA will create optical modeling and design tools to analyze and support beam propagation results at a contrast level of 1 by 10-11. Such high-contrast levels can support applications such as the NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder project, which may use a telescope system designed to separate dim reflected light from planets from the bright glare of their nearby parent stars. ORA said it will develop new ways to model full-vector propagation of electromagnetic waves while taking into account the effects of complicated apertures and mid-spatial frequency surface figure errors. Traditional modeling techniques, usually based on fast Fourier transform calculations, are limited by the particular sampling methods employed, the company said.