Background
The NASA Rapid Spacecraft Development Office (RSDO) Rapid IV Catalog includes two SwRI spacecraft, the SwSP-35 and SwSP-100 shown in Figure 1. Since the listed spacecraft are expected to be developed quickly, there is a need for more agile approaches for development and testing.
Figure 1: SwRI Spacecraft in NASA Rapid IV RSDO Catalog.
Approach
Our research objective for this project is to create digital twins for the SwSP-35 and SwSP-100 spacecraft capable of running the flight software in a meaningful scenario. The project is divided into two phases. Phase 1 initiates the project with a survey and comparison of selected open source and commercial tools. The remainder of Phase 1 and Phase 2 will develop digital twins for the SwRI entries in the Rapid IV Catalog. Phase 1 will develop a digital twin for the SwSP-35; Phase 2 will develop a digital twin for the SwSP-100.
In each phase, we will first build an application-layer bridge followed by a low-level hardware virtualization. Each step represents an increasing level of complexity and model fidelity.
Accomplishments
In Phase 2, we modeled the SwSP-100 at the application-bridge level using NASA 42 and the Guidance, Navigation, and Control. We successfully tested the model in transitioning from Detumble to Coarse Pointing modes. We have continued with hardware virtualization for a higher fidelity test.