ADVANCED INTERACTIVE VISUALISATION AND SIMULATION OF SPACECRAFT FORMATION USING VIRTUAL REALITY
- Paper number
IAC-08.E1.4.11
- Author
Mr. Ka Wai LEE, RMIT University, Australia, Australia
- Coauthor
Prof. Pavel M. Trivailo, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia
- Year
2008
- Abstract
Simulation of the complex motion of spacecraft formations and their reconfiguration usually involves sophisticated mathematical models. The resulting 3D motions of the spacecraft are difficult to describe in traditional written standard textbooks supplemented with the ”static” pictures with limited explanation. Most current space education relies on these methods. It is desirable to have a dynamic simulation environment which is able to demonstrate and visualise the spacecraft formation and dynamic properties in a more interesting and interactive way. Software packages of this kind were distributed to the market. However, their aims focused on simulating particular satellite constellations such as Iridium and Globalstar, and many of them were not designed for the education purposes. More importantly, they are licensed and mainly built for commercial use. An innovative software package is being developed for space education at RMIT University Australia. The software package combines the advantages of GUI development in Visual Basic and the Virtual Reality 3D environment display in VRML by using Cortona SDK. The windows application software is capable of visualising and simulating real time customised spacecraft orbital motion in the 3D space environment with interactive GUIs and VRML controls. The spacecrafts footprint histories are also clearly drawn on a 2D world map through the map projection technique. Simultaneously, detailed information of the spacecrafts parameters, such as altitude, speed and orbital period, are written to a separate table in real time as a reference. Users can also experience instant feedback results by changing parameters of the spacecraft in control panel. Virtual Reality is a powerful tool to demonstrate the features of complex modelling of the spacecraft dynamics. This allows users to travel through the virtual world providing a better and more intuitive insight and understanding of dynamics thus achieving the educational objective.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-08.E1.4.11.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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