This article studies the photodetachment of a single electron anion near an attractive center. Both the differential and total photodetachment cross section are analysed. We obtain the electron flux crossing through a spherical detector centered at t
he force center using the semiclassical approximation. The closed-orbit theory gives the total cross section which contains a smooth background and an oscillatory part. Concrete calculations and discussions are carried out for two types of wave source: the $s$- and $p_z$-wave source. Photodetachment processes for three conditions are compared: an anion near an attractive center, near a repulsive center and in a homogeneous electric field.
We demonstrate how observations of pulsars can be used to help navigate a spacecraft travelling in the solar system. We make use of archival observations of millisecond pulsars from the Parkes radio telescope in order to demonstrate the effectiveness
of the method and highlight issues, such as pulsar spin irregularities, which need to be accounted for. We show that observations of four millisecond pulsars every seven days using a realistic X-ray telescope on the spacecraft throughout a journey from Earth to Mars can lead to position determinations better than approx. 20km and velocity measurements with a precision of approx. 0.1m/s.
Variations in the solar wind density introduce variable delays into pulsar timing observations. Current pulsar timing analysis programs only implement simple models of the solar wind, which not only limit the timing accuracy, but can also affect meas
urements of pulsar rotational, astrometric and orbital parameters. We describe a new model of the solar wind electron density content which uses observations from the Wilcox Solar Observatory of the solar magnetic field. We have implemented this model into the tempo2 pulsar timing package. We show that this model is more accurate than previous models and that these corrections are necessary for high precision pulsar timing applications.
