Digital Twin for Spacecraft Concepts

A digital twin can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical or conceptual system that digitally exchanges data with its counterpart to inform decisions throughout the lifecycle. Much digital twin development effort has focused on representing physical systems that already exist to support testing and operations. These applications are important to optimize the real system's performance while simultaneously refining the digital twin's models using telemetry data from the real system. But what is the role of a digital twin before a physical system has been realized, and how does it inform decisions during the concept development phase? In this paper we propose an approach to establishing a re-usable digital twin that interoperates with a set of concept design tools and system definition models. More than just a standalone satellite simulator, our digital twin for conceptual spacecraft automatically ingests configuration data created using concept design tools, simulates performance in a virtual environment, and outputs performance data that are instantly compared with requirements defined in system definition models. The digital fluidity with which data is exchanged between models of estimation, simulation, and definition enables a rapid way to verify spacecraft designs as they are being conceived.