Jonathan Diegelman - Modeling Spacecraft Separation Dynamics in Julia

Jonathan Diegelman explains how NASA migrated spacecraft separation dynamics simulations from Simulink to Julia, achieving a massive performance increase.

Modeling Spacecraft Separation Dynamics in Julia Jonathan Diegelman, NASA Launch Services Program and A.I. Solutions Abstract: A common requirement for commercially launched NASA science missions is that the launch vehicle imparts low enough rotational velocity to the spacecraft to avoid pointing sensitive equipment toward the sun while keeping high enough separation velocity to preclude re-contact between the vehicles. To assess compliance with this requirement, engineers in the Guidance, Navigation, and Control group in NASA’s Launch Services Program run high-fidelity simulations of the separation event. In the past, the GN&C group has favoured high-level modeling languages in order to reduce development time. Unfortunately, these simulations tend to be slow in comparison to direct implementations in low-level languages such as C++ or Fortran, making it difficult to iterate on analyses and build intuition about the system. In this presentation, a new spacecraft separation simulation written in Julia’s SciML suite of tools is shown to outperform the legacy tools by orders of magnitude while providing even greater flexibility. Additionally, the new simulation takes advantage of the key feature of the SciML tools: composability with the rest of the Julia ecosystem of packages. This allows features such as automatic differentiation/local sensitivity analysis, physical units, uncertainty propagation, interactive notebooks, and 3D visualization. Beyond the aerospace industry, this presentation is a case study in how better tooling can improve the way engineers think about complex systems. For more information on the SciML Open Source Scientific Machine Learning Software Ecosystem, see sciml.ai/ For more info on the Julia Programming Language, follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/JuliaLanguage Contents 00:00 Welcome! 00:15 Overview: A case study in tooling for engineering simulations 01:52 Spacecraft Separation: Problem description and modelling 04:22 Current Separation Analysis Tool: Flexibility, complexity and efficiency issues 07:49 RECURSAT: Design, requirements and capabilities 12:56 RECURSAT Demo: The ballast placement problem S/O to github.com/pitmonticone for the video timestamps! Want to help add timestamps to our YouTube videos to help with discoverability? Find out more here: github.com/JuliaCommunity/YouTubeVideoTimestamps Interested in improving the auto generated captions? Get involved here: github.com/JuliaCommunity/YouTubeVideoSubtitles