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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, December 4, 2017 / 3:30 PM, Building 8 Auditorium

photo of Sean Phillips

Sean Phillips

"Visualizing Trajectories for Deep Space Gateway and Ocean World Orbiter Missions"

screen shot of trajectory software

ABSTRACT -- Humanity is entering a new age of space exploration focusing beyond Earth orbit. Deep space mission design organizations such as NASA and ESA face new mission goals with complex custom computing and visualization requirements. Modern technology platforms such as JavaFX and Java 8 enable these intricate workflows. The complexities of trajectory design within deep space regimes will be discussed. Examples range from missions to liquid-rich worlds such as Europa and Enceladus, but also humanities return to the Lunar surface via excursion missions from the planned Deep Space Gateway.

Science orbits in these vicinities involve significant computational challenges, due to complex gravitational effects. Demonstrations will include the Deep Space Trajectory Explorer (DSTE), software designed completely in JavaFX and Java 8 providing rapid parallel search and filtration capabilities. Custom hardware-accelerated visualizations are used to visually identify trajectory solutions that exploit these dense gravity fields. The DSTE immerses the user within the design space, letting the data be the interface to the user. Data visualizations will feature a mix of custom multilayered 2D plots and interactive 3D tools.

SPEAKER -- Sean Phillips is a Consulting Software Engineer with NASA and USAF Aerospace industry partner a.i. solutions. Sean's specialties are data visualization and interplanetary trajectory design for small bodies in dynamical systems. Sean is a technical leader and presenter for software engineering topics including cloud computing, Java and JavaFX development. Currently he serves as the lead software engineer for the NASA James Webb Space Telescope Flight Dynamics Ground System and the Deep Space Trajectory Explorer software product.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov