SPACEPHOTOS

A highly-modified F-18 Hornet being flown by the Dryden Flight Research Center in a joint NASA/DOD/industry research program touches down on the main runway at Edwards Air Force Base following another research flight. The two-seat ''B'' model F-18, formerly a support aircraft at DFRC, has been converted into a Sytems Research Aircraft (SRA) to flight test a variety of experimental components and sub-sytems. Among the more than 20 experiments is the Advanced L-Probe Air Data Integration, or ''ALADIN,'' scheduled to begin flight tests this fall. Similiar to a standard pitot tube, the fuselage-mounted ALADIN probe measures and integrates Mach speed, altitude, angle of attack and side-slip angle. The experiment also incorporates a neural network computer which will be ''trained'' to compute air data measured by the probe.