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Jeremy Shidner

Publications and source records attributed to Jeremy Shidner.

Enabling Thread Safety and Parallelism in the Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories II

Development of the Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories (POST) began in the 1970s. Since then, it has become widely utilized across NASA, industry, and academia to solve a variety of atmospheric ascent and entry problems. Its successor, POST2, has undergone many upgrades since its release in the 1990s. Recently, there has been an increasing desire to take advantage of the advances in parallel computing for both offline and online systems. Thus, modifications were made to allow POST2 to simulate multiple trajectories simultaneously without adversely affecting results. This capability is leveraged to calculate optimization solutions in parallel as opposed to sequentially. A demonstration of the benefits is presented using a small set of POST2 regression tests, as well as a project simulating a human-scale Lunar lander.

Anthony Williams↗

Efficient and Accurate Terrain Integration & Application to Modeling and Simulation of Planetary Landing Systems

As planetary spacecraft landing system complexity increases, pre-flight performance assessments include correspondingly more detailed and complex models that represent the various environmental elements and vehicle subsystems. Specifically, the relevance and criticality of planetary terrain modeling in the context of precision landing and hazard avoidance (PL&HA) has become evident as both commercial and national agencies return to the Lunar surface and beyond.

Terrain↗

Independent Verification and Validation for Artemis I Ascent Integrated Flight Performance Simulation

The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) has performed independent model development to support cross-model verification for the Space Launch System (SLS) Program since 2012 which culminated, for Artemis I, in a postflight reconciliation analysis of the Artemis I ascent trajectory (validation). This post-flight analysis was completed by both the NESC and the SLS Program. Upon successful completion of the Artemis I mission, multiple preflight simulations of the nominal ascent trajectory were updated with Day of Launch (DOL) conditions and simulated results were compared to reconstructed flight data derived from telemetry measurements. Dispersed trajectories were also produced using a combination of DOL conditions and preflight uncertainties, which ideally should bound the Artemis I flight data. Finally, multibody dynamics were simulated for some of the separation events to support clearance analyses. This paper focuses on validating and understanding the accuracy of the models by comparing simulated results against the Artemis I flight data. In addition, discrepancies uncovered between simulations led to opportunities to investigate areas for potential model improvement to refine preflight simulations for future Artemis missions. Included in this paper is background on the flight performance simulation tools, the postflight analysis approach, and a comparison of simulation results against the Artemis I flight data. Simulated results were found to generally be in close agreement with each other and the Artemis I flight data.

Jacob Fleck↗