Interactive 3D Visualization to Support Concurrent Engineering in the Early Space Mission Design Phase

The development of space systems involves complex interdisciplinary systems engineering. The concurrent engineering (CE) approach has been successfully applied to the early design phase of space missions. To bridge the gap between the development phases and between the different domain experts, a model based system engineering (MBSE) approach is showing promising results. To support CE and MBSE during space mission development, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has started developing a new tool called Virtual Satellite. It offers extended software support required by CE for inter-domain communication, data exchange, dependency analysis, on the fly data analysis, data consistency while maintaining a common system model based on the MBSE approach. However, the general issues of inter-domain communication and understanding still exist and may lead to misinterpretation. To overcome this problem it is intended to take advantage of interactive 3D visualization and Virtual Reality techniques to visualize the complex system model and, thus, provide a common understanding of the system model and the intrinsic domain knowledge. Furthermore, this will promote the experts to communicate their ideas and improve the visibility of potential design issues. The paper describes the efforts taken at DLR in this direction, architecture details and advantages of adopting these techniques into space mission development from the early design phase