Lunar lander mission evaluation lab

Space exploration and mission success are dependent upon assessing mission viability. When a new mission and vehicle are defined, a reasonable facsimile must be built to conduct trade studies. In the case of the Altair lunar lander, we have developed a simulation lab with a specific hardware and software architecture to facilitate trade studies. Our starting point is to design and implement simplified guidance and navigation and control algorithms for the lunar landing trajectory. This trajectory gets integrated into an analysis of the communications system. We are using a software and hardware platform that allows for multiple teams and companies to integrate their simulation models into a single evaluation model. We discuss the software and hardware architecture which includes autocode generation targeted for a single board computer, and Ethernet connections used for integrating multiple labs. A discussion of how to incorporate flight hardware into the simulation environment is also presented.