UAH students join international lunar simulation

Kyle Burger
WAAVtv.com
Huntsville, Alabama
 
Students from the University of Alabama-Huntsville recently fared-well in a high-tech lunar exploration competition.

“The events (of the simulation) actually happened slowly, because we are in space and things happen slowly in space,” UAH Director for Modeling, Simulation and Analysis, Mikel Petty, Ph.D. said. “It takes a long time to go from the earth to the moon.”

But the minds of UAH modeling and simulation students work furiously on a simulating a lunar exploration operation, complete with a rover and communications satellite.

“(We developed) some of the algorithm, we actually had an orbital propagator to determine to constellation orbit of the satellites,” Daniel O’Neil, technical manager at Marshall Space Flight Center, said.

A very advanced eight member UAH team competed in a worldwide competition known as "the smackdown" in Orlando, Fla.

Teams from universities around the world develop sophisticated computer simulations that work together, in real-time to simulate a lunar exploration scenario.

“We were the only southeastern team and university in Alabama to participate in the event,” student Crystal Fordyce said. “The other teams were from Penn State and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Other teams included: Pennsylvania State University, Technion (Israel), University of Genoa (Italy), and Marconi University (Italy).

UAH came home with two awards, including the Pitch Award, which recognizes collaboration with other teams, and the Board of Directors award. But what may help these students in the future is that the program was sponsored by AEgis Technologies and NASA.

“Working with NASA is a big deal,” student Swetha Govindaiah said. “It's a big thing for me. It gives me a lot of experience and new thoughts about modeling and simulation. I would like to work for a modeling simulation industry.”

The partial eclipse of the Moon from lunar orbit

The view from low lunar orbit. The partial eclipse of the Moon June 4, 2012 may not have seemed very dramatic, for those living along the Pacific Rim fortunate enough to see it, but this line up of nodes and crossings became a solar eclipse when viewed from the Moon using Martin Schweiger's priceless Orbiter Simulator (2010 P1) program. On the left Venus closes in for it's June 5 transit. The angle above was weaved from a perspective 70 kilometers over the Moon's western limb timed at 0946 UT, June 4, 2012 [Orbiter 2010 P1/Martin Schweiger].

Sequential HDTV stills capture a total eclipse of the Sun (a dramatic 2009 total eclipse of the Moon for those of us still on Earth), from Japan's lunar orbiter SELENE-1 (Kaguya) [JAXA/NHK/SELENE].

Model Lunar Lander Design for Emulating Space Flight and a Lunar Touchdown

"Flight Article," from Moidel's design for a lab-scale lunar landing flight simulator. (Carnegie Mellon University is an affiliate partner with the Astrobotics Google Lunar X-Prize team [Robotics Institute/Carnegie Mellon].

Justin B. Moidel
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Lunar landers are challenged to descend from a lunar orbit to the moon’s surface under a gravitational force of 1.62 m/s2, about one sixth the magnitude of earth gravity. The purpose of this research is to design and simulate a lunar lander model which will emulate the flight and landing of a robotic lunar spacecraft in order to test guidance, navigation and control (GNC) software.

Autonomous control will be developed for descent, soft landing and attitude control. An emulation can test lab-scale landing hardware in addition to GNC software and autonomy of a robotic lunar lander. This paper describes a design for a model lunar lander available for testing in two separate environments, one which constricts the lander models motion so a descent is not possible and another incorporates an innovative gravity offload mechanism to compensate for the lesser gravity of the Moon.

Read the (pdf) paper, HERE.

NASA’s first iPhone game: LERover Sim

"Ever dreamed of controlling your own Lunar rover?" You can now control a simulated one with NASA’s first iPhone game: the Lunar Electric Rover Simulator.

Controlling the rover is quite a simple affair, but you’ll be able to finish various challenges and learn a lot about the Moon and how the Lunar rover works in the process. There’s also an interactive gallery with images of the rover and the Lunar Outpost it supplies.

Available for free at the App Store HERE.

NASA ARC Moon landing simulations (2)

John Millus

Astronomy - Space-About.com

If this doesn't get the conspiracy theorists talking, I don't know what will. NASA is currently undergoing simulations of what it will be like for astronauts to return to the moon. This is not to say that they are taking Moon landing footage to be used later to fake a Moon landing (although, I fear that it will be taken that way). Instead, NASA is using a Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) to test how the new class of lunar lander will behave when landing on the Moon's surface. And I must say, it does look pretty realistic at times.

These kinds of tests are important as they allow NASA to begin testing technology and training astronauts earlier on in the project's development. And it will also save money in the long run.

Looking almost like a video game, astronauts have the ability to control a simulated landing craft as it moves through the 10 story building where the VMS is held. The data that is collected will allow NASA to make refinements to the landing craft design as well as anticipate any potential problems. Above all though, it is simply quite an impressive technological achievement.

Wild ride on NASA's massive simulator

NASA Ames' Vertical Motion Simulator, the largest-such simulator in the world, has been used since 1980 to help train pilots to fly helicopters, fighters, and space shuttles. Now, it is being used for training on the next-generation lunar lander.

Daniel Terdiman
geek gestalt - CNET

Mountain View --There I was, staking my claim to a pilot's slot in one of NASA's next-generation lunar landers, and to be perfectly frank, I think I'd better not quit my day job.

"I think we probably walked away from that," said NASA aerospace engineer Eric Mueller, after one rough touchdown. It was an overly charitable assessment of my performance. I'd hate to know what he was really thinking.

Read the story HERE.

Lunar Rover Simulator '09

On Wednesday, John Frassanito & Associates released LUNAR ROVER Sim '09, a simple but detailed moon base simulation based on NASA's Constellation architecture. A free download of the program is available HERE, in versions for both Mac and PC.

New tool to visualize lunar eclipse

"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method for using computer graphics to simulate and render an accurate visualization of a lunar eclipse. The model uses celestial geometry of the sun, Earth, and moon, along with data for the Earth's atmosphere and the moon's peculiar optical properties to create picture-perfect images of lunar eclipses."

"The computer-generated images, which are virtually indistinguishable from actual photos of eclipses, offer a chance to look back into history at famous eclipses, or peek at future eclipses scheduled to occur in the coming years and decades. The model can also be configured to show how the eclipse would appear from any geographical perspective on Earth..."

Read the Post at PhysOrg HERE.

Chuck Wood working on Lunar Second Life

While on the subject, I can never say enough good things about Charles Wood and his ever-growing LPOD. The Lunar Picture of the Day is a first and second tourist destination for me every single day.

After only having briefly flitted around in Second Life (and finding it a strangely relaxing experience, until my "Avatar" was confronted with a 40 meter high floating 3D copy of John McCain's head!) it was wonderful to receive news that Chuck Wood is involved with creating a Second Life lunar "Island," based on the crater Timocharis.

Chuck shared the news on the March 3 LPOD: "Do you have an avatar? Have you been in Second Life? You are going to want to, I hope, later this year when the MoonWorld virtual reality simulation goes online. Second Life (SL) is a persistent virtual world that is very different from a web site. It is a three dimensional environment that you explore not by looking at, but by walking, running or flying through. "You" are represented by an avatar which can be either sex or even an animal or a mythological creature. My colleagues and I at the Center for Educational Technologies are creating an island (a distinct parcel of land in SL) that will be terraformed (lunaformed?) to resemble the area of the crater Timocharis."

Read the rest HERE.

Lunar Scenario for Flight Simulator 2004

Just after having tried, and failed, to start a serious discussion about simulation environments for would-be and arm-chair "Citizen Scientists," among serious competitors for a place in NASA's "new era of lunar exploration, TerraBuilder of Ontario announces a rudimentary Lunar Scenario for Microsoft's popular Flight Simulator platform.

Although I will most definitely purchase and download the program, if only to award TerraBuilder's thoughtfulness, I immediately found myself saying, "gee, I really could have used this, three years ago."

TerraBuilder's "LRV for TerraBuilder: Moon" is a long-overdue and essential sim for the hundreds of thousands of lunatics like me that, unfortunately, also comes with two heartbreaking drawbacks.

The mare, highland, rilles and mountain scenes are very welcome, don't get me wrong. Unfortunately, the hard-core Flight Simulator addicts long ago upgraded to Flight Simulator X, and this add-on is designed for Flight Simulator 2004.

Fortunately, however, for me, that's not a problem.

While others (like my great and good friend "Waccobird," in Florida) were spending hours perfecting Rocketplane instrument ratings on FSX, doing carrier landings with the skill of Alan Shepherd, I just never bothered to upgrade to FSX. Indeed, I never bothered to load even FS'04 on my seriously upgraded machine. In fact, this machine was seriously pumped primarily to fully experience Dr. Martin Schweiger's Orbiter Simulator 2006 (P2), which stole my heart away from Flight Simulator four years ago.

For nearly a decade, this Senior Fellow at London's University College London has quietly upgraded and then released, for free, to hundreds of thousands of his hungry followers what is probably the best Open Source and real time spaceflight simulator available to the public.

Being a serious lunatic, I've been disappointed with his Clementine based lunar albedo maps, but not with OrbiterSim's astonishingly grand orbital dynamics, and not for its Open Source and eager add-on developer community that's made possible for me countless rendezvous and dockings with ISS, at least eight dozen flights to the Moon and back, mastering re-entry and learning what one can and cannot do starting from a dead stop from the surface of Earth.

I've built a thousand scenarios, including the retrieval of Vanguard from it's more than 50 year- old perch, passing through the Van Allen Belts every 100 minutes since 1958.

With no apparent need of fanfare, Dr. Schweiger has done more to recreate the "feel" of real-time space travel for the lucky few who have taken the brief time necessary to learn, than NASA.

It's the reason I bought the Gateway HD display, the Nvidia 9800 graphics card, and why I partitioned my hard drives to run both Vista and XP.

The other drawback to TerraBuilder: Moon, is that the realistically diverse lunar scenery (which I fully expect to be included in Dr. Schweiger's next Orbiter Sim, hopefully soon, perhaps after Kaguya completes it's laser altimeter model) does not include actual features. At least when I land near the Apollo landing sites, or Reiner Gamma, the landscape, essentially a large photograph, is actually brighter.

Accomplishing a lunar landing using OrbiterSim just isn't as rewarding when the scenery is Clementine-correct albedo and color is also flat as a piece of paper. But, the combination of TerraBuilder: Moon and the otherwise exceptional and essential Orbiter Simulator, is at least a step in the right direction.

And so, if only for the well-done detail of its Apollo Lunar Rover, for the concept vehicles, and details and promise of more to come, I will dust off my metal can filled with Flight Simulator 2004 disks and finally bother to load it on this new system that has long outgrown it; to reward myself for another successfull navigation of the DeltaGliderIV from the Global TransPark in North Carolina, to refueling in LEO, through TLI, to LLO, to Terminal Descent and another satisfyingly precise 2 mps touchdown where Descartes C crater is supposed to be, to experience the look of a real moon on my HD display.

I want to reward TerraBuilder for, if belatedly, remembering the simulation of space travel is as close as some of us will ever get to walking and riding on Earth's Moon. They only have to work on the longitude and latitude and existing topography. The lame excuse that they are awaiting more details from LRO and Kaguya just doesn't fly. I want to land in Taurus-Littrow and see the South Massif, Tortilla Flats, and see the broad Cayley plain Charlie Duke and John Young could see from the Cinco craters up on Stone Mountain, and even measure that local magnetic anomaly while wondering over the expanse of South Ray Crater spread out below.

We have the technology.