Human Space Flight

Simulating Millions of Trips to the Moon and Back

Image of Orion capsule from space showing earth and moon in the distance
On Monday, Nov. 28, 2022, NASA’s Orion spacecraft reached its maximum distance from Earth during the Artemis I mission—268,563 miles away from our home planet, farther than any spacecraft designed to send humans to space and back has gone before. This photo of Orion captures a unique view of Earth and the Moon, taken from a camera mounted on one of the spacecraft's solar arrays. NASA

Following NASA’s successful launch of the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022, and with the upcoming crewed Artemis II mission, the agency’s Artemis Program is pushing forward toward its goal of establishing a sustainable human and robotic presence on the moon. To support this effort, the Flight Sciences Lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center provides computational resources to aerospace engineers to simulate millions of flight scenarios for the Space Launch System, Orion crew vehicle, Lunar Gateway space station, and landing vehicles from commercial partners. These simulations are used by the Artemis program to verify of mission requirements, ensure crew and vehicle safety, and develop of the Guidance, Navigation, and Control flight software algorithms for future spaceflight missions.

Quick Facts

Analyzing Orion simulation variables in the Flight Sciences Lab is crucial to understanding how the spacecraft will meet mission goals. I can submit thousands of scenarios to run before the end of the day and come back to a rich data set ready for analysis the very next morning.

Ian Dux,
NASA Glenn Research Center
  • The Flight Sciences Lab at NASA Johnson houses compute clusters comprised of over 20,000 cores, high-speed networks, and parallel filesystems that can be accessed by engineers across NASA, providing dedicated computing systems to simulate millions of possible spacecraft scenarios.
  • These simulations predict the behavior of spacecraft dynamics during flight, as well as the performance of the onboard flight software both before and during Artemis missions.
  • Results of these Monte-Carlo simulation sweeps—used to predict the possible outcomes of uncertain events—help program managers and engineers quantify risks in the system designs of spacecraft, as well as ensuring components and software meet mission requirements.
  • The Flight Sciences Lab contributed heavily to the success of the Artemis I mission, and engineers at NASA Johnson are already using these resources to simulate future missions, including Artemis II (2024), Artemis III (2025), and Gateway (2025+).

Researchers

  • Daniel Jordan, NASA Johnson Space Center
  • Jeff Triplett, NASA Johnson Space Center

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