Spacecraft design and development is a complex Task which requires a long lifecycle and many phases of iterative construction. Thus, there are usually many versions of configuration design evolving over time. A clear understanding and comparison of these different Versions of spacecraft configurations can bring benefits to both stakeholders and domain experts of the project. However, usually the configuration and system data is stored in textual format in tables and in files which is not efficient to compare results by checking all the subsystem and parameters in different versions one by one. As an alternative, this paper gives a detailed insight how to compare versions by means of 3D visualization and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The basis of our approach is the Virtual Satellite (VirSat) which is the standard tool for concurrent engineering studies at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The key performance indicators of an early space mission design are the mass, the power consumption, and the temperature. In order to Highlight differences of these quantities and distribution of key performance indicators, the VirSat uses color coding for more intuitive understanding. To analyze the changes of geometry information, additional two visualization modes have been integrated for comparing and indicating the differences between versions. In the first mode, two versions of configurations are visually overlapped. The differences are indicated by special colors. In the second mode, different versions of the design yield a successive animation in order to follow the design evolution. Both modes require model transformation from VirSat's central system data model to visualization model which is used for appropriate visualization approaches. The paper gives a detailed architectural overview and discusses benefits and future opportunities.
Real-time immersive visualization for satellite configuration and version comparison
2017 ; Noordwijk, Netherlands
2017-03-29
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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