EADS Mission Planning Simulation Project

EADS CRC

EADS Corporate Research Center is a joint European research institution created to fulfill the R&D needs of other EADS subsidiaries. EADS CRC's primary mission is to integrate cutting edge technology into actual and future EADS products and to maintain and develop technological innovation in order to reinforce EADS's long term competitiveness.


Challenge

EADS Mission Planning needed an application that would allow them to visualize mission planning sequence - starting from the earliest preparations - in order to validate flight plans and technical constraints, as well as to communicate the future mission's goals and characteristics to the staff and crew. Its existing solution, Performer software, required mission planning over 3-5 months to achieve.

The overall project was to be a generic 3D spatial mission planning simulation toolset, and to create it, three separate modules were built. Each module simulates a specific mission planning element (with several generic functions implemented) and converges in the final application.

The simulation toolset was first needed for a space mission concerning the CAM ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle). The ATV supplies and removes detritus from the International Space Station (ISS), and the ATV's motor corrects any ISS orbit trajectory deviation. The objective was to create a visual simulation of the CAM (Collision Avoidance Maneuver), which is effectuated by the ATV if there is a risk of collision with the ISS while docking. The CAM simulation serves to validate constraints and the correct progression of docking maneuvers.

The second space mission that needed to be simulated was an Ariane launch of a satellite: Ariane's take off, orbit trajectory, ejection and activation of the satellite on its final orbit, via intermediary orbital deviations. EADS needed to be able to visualize the launch from different points of view.

Solution:



Thanks to Virtools technology, EADS created a visual simulation application for collision avoidance maneuvers and Ariane launches, allowing the possibility of previewing different scenarios for future missions. Virtools therefore confirms its ability to handle complex simulations that correctly displays objects a few meter long (e.g. a satellite) in very large environments (e.g. our solar system).

Thanks to Virtools Dev's comprehensive and powerful interactive 3D development platform and the low-level access provided through its SDK, EADS was able to easily integrate complex external calculations into their Dev-based applications. Dev's real time 3D capabilities were put to maximum use with EADS's generic applications to visualize different scenarios based on either pre-calculated trajectories or trajectories calculated during the simulation by executables based on Matlab models.

Furthermore, Virtools solutions allowed EADS to create space mission simulations that can be reconfigured interactively and that return contextual information.

• Easy integration of external data thanks to the Virtools SDK.
• Generic architecture that allows mission planners to define and prepare several scenarios in an accurate virtual environment.
• Significantly reduced mission planning (from 3-5 months to under 5 weeks)