There’s a group of researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, who can fly across the country in the morning, launch to the moon in the afternoon, and still make it home in plenty of time for supper.
It’s all thanks to the Cockpit Motion Facility, one of the most visible elements of a broader collection of flight simulation facilities in Langley’s Simulation Development and Analysis Branch.
The mission of the branch: take anything that NASA researchers can dream up and make it feel real. Langley’s flight simulation capabilities are research-oriented and experimental. They go beyond simulation and become tools of research and discovery.
“We conduct full-mission, high-fidelity simulations,” said Victoria Chung, head of the Simulation Development and Analysis Branch. “We do Monte Carlo simulations,” which she describes as “what-if” testing. “You create thousands and thousands of scenarios and just let them run to stress the envelope and see what is going to fail.”
Chung’s team can simulate an entire vehicle and its interactions with the atmosphere from takeoff to landing.
The flight decks in the Cockpit Motion Facility simulate the control systems of air and space vehicles. They contain advanced computational and display hardware that puts pilots, and sometimes astronauts, in highly-accurate cockpits and flight scenarios. At the center of the facility is the motion base, a hydraulically-powered six-legged platform featuring a full range of motion.
The system combines state-of-the-art displays with motion cues in a research cockpit, to trick our eyes and vestibular system, the sensory system located in our ear canal responsible for balance and spatial orientation. Engaging the vestibular system is vital to creating realistic simulations for test pilots so that researchers get the best possible data.
While one experiment is in progress on the motion base, up to two additional research teams can test additional configurations and scenarios using flight decks on fixed sites nearby. When one team of researchers completes their experiments on the motion base and the next experiment using a different simulator needs access to it, technicians do a simulator shuffle.
The lab has done plenty of remarkable work, including support of NASA’s Ares I-X launch in 2009.
“We provided the Ares I-X simulation that was used to analyse the vehicle’s performance with the wind profile on the day of launch in order to provide a go/no-go flight decision,” said Chung.
Today, researchers are using the Cockpit Motion Facility and its motion base to improve the simulation technology for aerospace research. As that research concludes, technicians will do another simulator swap to set the stage for a new team of NASA researchers and airline pilots eager to help flight crews better analyze and adapt to complex in-flight challenges using enhanced flight deck instrumentation and alerting systems.