Virtual Reality Brings Engineers to the Moon
By Kelly McSweeney
How do you go to the moon without actually going to the moon? Virtual reality (VR). This brings space closer to home so that engineers can see their designs in action. On the NextSTEP-2 program, the precursor to HALO, the Northrop Grumman team used VR and 3D printing to create models of habitat modules for the Gateway, NASA's outpost that will orbit the moon.
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Computer-aided design (CAD) helped to advance engineering from paper to computer. And while CAD designs are widely used today, they are still limited by the screen. For projects such as satellites and habitats for space, prototypes are crucial for helping engineers evaluate and improve their designs. However, it simply isn't feasible to test designs in the environment in which they will operate. Virtual reality helps to bridge that gap so that engineers can mimic scenarios to see if there is anything in the design that should be tweaked.
"Before building an expensive prototype, we can take the models that are being designed and we can look at them through VR to help make sure we are making the right decisions, especially since human factors play a large role," Lead Systems Engineer Adeena Mignogna explains.
At the VR Lab, software engineers convert CAD models into a format that gaming systems can read. They use a 3D creation tool called Unreal Engine.
"It has all the physics models and some of the math built in, so we don't have to program it from scratch," Mignogna says. "It has the baseline, and we program the specifics."
