Simulation Based Design Approaches to Study Transportation and Habitat Alternatives for Deep Space Missions

This paper discusses the adoption of Simulation Based Design (SBD) approaches involving 3D Virtual Reality (VR) based digital mockup models to support the study of transportation and assembly alternatives in the context of Deep Space Missions as well as landing on the Moon. An initial set of designs have been proposed using immersive VR environments. The modeling, planning and simulation scope includes the transfer of equipment from the lunar lander to the moon surface, design of astronaut habitats and assembly of such habitats using robots. Using this SBD approach, the project team proposed, compared and analyzed transport and assembly alternatives for these design contexts. The simulation environments were built using the immersive Vive VR platform and Unity 3D software tools.