A reusable, real-time spacecraft dynamics simulator

DARTS Shell (DSHELL) is a multi-mission spacecraft simulator for development, test, and verification of flight software and hardware. DSHELL is portable from desktop workstations to real-time, hardware-in-the-loop simulation environments. DSHELL combines the DARTS S/C flexible multibody dynamics computational engine with libraries of hardware models (for actuators, sensors, motors and encoders) into an integrated simulation environment that can be easily configured and interfaced with flight software and hardware for various real-time and non real-time S/C simulation needs. DSHELL is in use by several of NASA's interplanetary deep space missions including Galileo, Cassini, Mars Pathfinder, and several projects in JPL's Flight System Testbed.