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Nikita Beebe Thesis
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Advanced Onboard Spacecraft Console Instrument and Interface for Spaceflight Guidance and Navigation
- Nikita Beebe
This proposal defines an advanced onboard navigation interface and trajectory design tool for future astronauts. As the space industry expands and becomes more commercialized, future spaceflight will include long-duration exploration to more distant destinations. Mission tasks, such as rendezvous, docking, descent, landing, and in-space trajectory planning will become commonplace. Presently, many of these tasks are performed with the assistance of ground-based mission control. The onboard crew typically has limited control of vehicle guidance and navigation. This is in stark contrast with the more mature commercial and private aircraft industry, for which guidance, navigation and control are operated primarily by the crew. As the space industry continues to expand with more and more space vehicles, it will become necessary and desirable for the crew to have independent onboard guidance, navigation and control capability. It will not be possible nor efficient to have ground-control operations of every space vehicle, particularly those that are distant from Earth. Just as the pilot operates a suite of instruments and controls on a conventional aircraft, new concepts for spacecraft crew interfaces will be needed for future space pilots.
As such, this research proposes the conception and design of an onboard spacecraft pilot interface called the “Spaceflight Console.” The purpose is to provide the crew full autonomy for spacecraft navigation and guidance via touch-controls and holographic visual displays. The objective is to design an intuitive interface for onboard trajectory planning and a wide range of mission tasks that will become more commonplace in the future, such as interplanetary departure, trajectory corrections, orbital insertion, rendezvous, station keeping, landing site selection and targeting, and so on.
The proposed Spaceflight Console will be built and demonstrated using a virtual-reality (VR) engineering-design platform designed by the ASTRO Lab at Texas A&M, called SpaceCRAFT. Using SpaceCRAFT crew interfaces can be designed, evaluated in the context of a mission environment in VR, and revised easily. Control panels for crew selections or data entry will be coupled with 3D visual displays that enable crew situational awareness in an orbital or interplanetary context. Similar to an aircraft cockpit and the usual suite of flight instruments, the Spaceflight Console presents intuitive information to the crew while internally performing complex computations to support the mission tasks. In effect, the Spaceflight Console aims to translate many complex ground-control capabilities into a fully-onboard system with a simple and intuitive interface that operates from the pilot’s perspective.