Interactive sharable environment for collaborative spacecraft design

An advanced integrated environment is being developed at JPL that links collaborators who wish to perform interactive design analyses and/or mission simulations. The environment utilizes commercial technology (such as 3D visualization) where applicable, but key pieces are currently provided by software developed in-house for user interaction and spacecraft modeling. It allows a mission scenario to be built and exercised at various levels (e.g., macro or micro simulation, modeling or analysis), and integrates existing tools preferred by participants "in-place". Mission information (e.g., target body, space environment), spacecraft information (e.g., drawings, structures), and payload information (e.g., subsystem or instrument models) are connected into a simulation which can be run from within an immersive sharable environment. This allows interaction of the users with components of particular interest to each while others can view the "big picture" results of the interactions, and make recommendations such as parameter trades or component alternatives. Components of this environment are currently being developed by several NASA centers who wish to leverage each other's strengths, and a shared information infrastructure facilitates the connections (e.g., access to databases of designs, products, models and data). We believe that the collaborative process is most successful when the participants can immediately see the collective results of their separate inputs, therefore our goal was to facilitate real-time collaborative interactivity. We will discuss the problems and achievements from early utilization of this evolving interactive environment, and describe the near-term plans for shared development and deployment of the collaborative capabilities across NASA.