NASA’s SLS Rocket Visualization May Help Accelerate Spacecraft Design
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November 8, 2019NASA’s SLS Rocket Visualization May Help Accelerate Spacecraft Design
NASA aims to send astronauts to the moon’s surface within the next five years. In order to make lunar exploration possible, NASA will require a robust fleet of lunar landers and other vehicles. A new visualization of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket may help accelerate the design process for moon-bound spacecraft.
NASA aerospace engineer Nettie Roozeboom came up with an idea that could significantly speed up the design of rockets, moon landers, and other spacecraft that will support lunar exploration. By connecting two NASA facilities, one for advanced aeronautics testing and the other for analysis, in real time, her proposal could speed up design tasks.
From wind to data, in no time flat! @NASAAmes created a visualization of the @NASA_SLS rocket, using a supercomputer & a wind tunnel. Discover how this could speed up spacecraft design, including for our #Artemis program: https://t.co/gfbN9FlHxa pic.twitter.com/3iKmZlhsvU
— NASA (@NASA) November 6, 2019
In September, Roozeboom tested her concept with SLS at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. SLS will ferry the Orion spacecraft to the Gateway in lunar orbit. The SLS team had to test the design of the rocket’s nose and ensure it could safely do the job for flights that will be used to bring goods to the moon.
Roozeboom’s job is not an easy one: She has to measure shaking caused by quickly changing pressure from the air a vehicle is moving through, as it travels through the atmosphere to get to space. These measurements indicate how designers should build their spacecraft to withstand the shaking present in real flights. While Roozeboom’s team conducts wind-tunnel tests, high-speed cameras snap the changing glow of an advanced paint that reveals pressure changes during the rocket’s simulated climb.
Aerospace engineer Nettie Roozeboom discusses preliminary data flowing in from a wind tunnel test of the SLS rocket. (Photo Credit: NASA / Advanced Supercomputing Division / Dominic Hart)
The demonstration, which was named after the game “Red Rover,” transferred as much as 400 terabytes of data from the wind tunnel to a supercomputer. From there, supercomputing experts took the wind tunnel experts’ uncanny software and optimized it for real-time visualization, according to NASA.
A model of the SLS rocket covered in a thin coat of pink at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. (Photo Credit: NASA / Ames Research Center / Dominic Hart)
The result was a colorful sight: NASA’s supercomputer sifted through incoming data and quickly revealed a visualization of the results. The SLS design team observed this exchange on a 1/4 billion-pixel hyperwall, and immediately corresponded with experts at Ames to adjust test conditions and data collection.
“This could be a tremendous benefit for programs early in the design cycle,” said Thomas Steva, an aerodynamics engineer on the SLS team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “That’s a time where high-fidelity data is typically sparse.”
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