The counts received by a radiation detector located on a space satellite were stored in a small set of binary scalers. The number of counts stored in these scalers was read out once per second for eventual transmission to earth via telemetry. This information was then used to determine counting rates as a function of location in space.nThe number of scalers used was too small to contain all the counts which could be received during the time interval between sucessive samplings of the scaler contents. This posed the problem of estimating the probability that the scalers had been filled, had automatically reset to zero, and had begun storing counts again during the interval between samplings.
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