CU AEROSPACE L.L.C. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: H9

Description

CU Aerospace (CUA) proposes development of a professional suite of software using the mathematical theory of Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS) to enable engineers and scientists from a wide range of disciplines to study, investigate, engineer and optimize systems dependent on chaotic, turbulent or unsteady flows. The Suite of Lagrangian Coherent Structure (SuiteLCS) software that CUA proposes to develop will be the first commercially and professionally available software package of its kind - enabling NASA engineers to propose and plan missions with new capabilities by identifying trajectories in Earth-Moon, cislunar, deep-space, or multi-body environments that have particular qualitative behavior, allowing engineers to find long term stable trajectories or those with minimum fuel usage and fast transit times. SuiteLCS will provide a complete generalization to dynamical structures used by NASA engineers in simplified dynamical models (CR3BP) - providing a high fidelity tool replacement for preliminary mission planning, broadening the mission search space and accelerating the mission design phase. SuiteLCS will be built on robust and high-quality development standards, using exceptional internal and open source external packages to accelerate development and successfully complete the Phase I technical objectives. The software will leverage parallel computing on distributed (MPI) and shared (OpenMP) memory architectures to reduce run-times. Phase II efforts may look to port parallel computation to cloud computing resources. The professional and open source Paraview and VTK software will be used for standardized import/export capability and high-quality visualization of potentially extremely large data sets. CUA anticipates that a Phase II delivery of SuiteLCS will have an immediate impact on mission design capabilities at NASA: enabling new mission concepts, earlier mission studies at higher fidelity, and broadening the mission search space.nbsp;