CompuServe Thread

NASA and 3DS

2 messages in this thread
#29900From: Rich SchwartzDec 17, 1992 10:13 AM
Chris, I am at Langley, working on the SEDS (Small Expendible Deployment System) secondary payload on a Delta II launch vehicle. The mission si to deploy a twenty KM long tether with a fifty lb. satellite on the end of it. My job is to animate teh rigid body dynamics of the satellite during the deployment. We will have dat on teh roll, pitch and yaw of the satelite at an 8Hz rate for 110 min., and I have been asked to incorporate all of this into the animation. So far, only teh first 80 seconds, with the Delta and the satellite have been completed from computed simulation of the mission. On the cost issue, I have gone straight to the dealer for the upgrade, and it is coming free of charge. I forgot to mention that teh main reason we got 3DS is to animate data from Doppler Global Velocimetry (DGV), a non-instrusive, laser based instrument for wind tunnel and flight testing. Thanks for the message. I am interested in hwo you are using 3DS. (Please forgive my terrible typing/spelling) Rich Schwartz
#30088From: Chris JohnstonDec 18, 1992 10:00 PM
Rich: I'm at Lewis, in the Processing Science and Technology Branch. We are most of the Materials Division's microgravity materials science effort. The branch includes the Microgravity Materials Science Lab and the Computational Materials Lab. I've been using 3DS to help with visualization on a couple of our projects. One of them is a prototype of a versatile modular furnace (the PMZF, or Programmable Multi-Zone Furnace). It is built from a number of nearly identical modules, each one being a furnace zone. I've done a couple of animations for PMZF that illustrate the modularity and the potential for easy (maybe even in-flight) repair. I've worked on animations for a couple of other projects, particularly ones that are hard to understand with a stack of flat paper drawings. Our labs get a lot of tour groups, and it seems like we are always uncompressing and running the visualization demos in our computational lab. We are in the middle of making up a "video tour" of the lab so our visitors can see what we've done without having a major impact on the machines in the lab. I might expand it to a full tour, including the experimental hardware in the MMSL, but that is a **LOT** of stuff to model… We got asked to help one of our users visualize the accelerometer data taken during his experiment runs on USML-1. Unfortunately, the experiments lasted most of 24 hours and took 3 channels of data at 12.5 HZ for the duration! Chris