NASA is preparing to send astronauts to explore the Moon’s south pole within the next five years as part of the Artemis program. Knowing that time is of the essence, NASA aerospace engineer Nettie Roozeboom thought of an idea that could speed up significantly the design of rockets, lunar landers and other spacecraft to support lunar exploration. By linking in real time two NASA facilities – one for advanced aeronautics testing, the other for powerful analysis of the results – her method could define a new way of doing business in the world of spacecraft and aircraft design. Last month, she showed how it could work during the latest tests of NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS.
This video is a visualization of fluctuating pressure measurements affecting the Space Launch System during a wind tunnel test to simulate the launch of the rocket. Aircraft and spacecraft must be designed to withstand these rapidly changing forces, called buffeting, or risk being shaken to pieces. The changes in pressure are visualized as colors (yellow: higher-than-average pressure; blue: lower-than-average pressure) and represent the moments before the rocket reaches supersonic speeds. Pressure-sensitive paint makes such accurate measurements possible.
Credits: NASA/Advanced Supercomputing Division
Roozeboom is in the perfect spot to bridge the worlds of testing rocket designs and crunching data.
In the wind tunnels at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, she helps aerospace designers – whether from NASA, other government agencies or private companies – study their vehicles’ performance by simulating the conditions expected in flight. From an experimental “green” aircraft concept designed by Boeing to reduce both emissions and noise to a launch abort system that would carry astronauts to safety if needed on the launch pad – Roozeboom has helped many designs get on their way.
Down the street at Ames, her neighbors at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility, or NAS, work with computer simulations and analyze complex data sets using one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
A real-time connection between the two disciplines could become an important tool for many. Traditionally, aerospace design teams carry their data from a wind tunnel test back to their workplace on a stack of hard drives, where it then takes months to analyze. If they realize they missed something, and more data would’ve been valuable, Roozeboom’s facility is in such high demand she won’t have a spot for them to do another test run until 2021—two years from the original test. With NASA’s schedule to land the first astronauts on the lunar surface in 2024, she knew this two-year design cycle wouldn’t fly.
That’s especially critical with all the new traffic she anticipates in the wind tunnels. As the first major step to returning astronauts to the Moon, NASA is working with nine American companies on delivery services to the lunar surface, and Roozeboom expects they’ll all come through her facility.
“The way I see it is: We, NASA, have asked you to do this, so how can we help you get there?” Roozeboom said. “I take it as my responsibility to go create the tools, help them connect to the right talent, and together we can save time.”
A model of the Space Launch System rocket covered in a thin coat of pink, pressure-sensitive paint is mounted in a wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The high-tech paint acts as a pressure sensor covering the entire surface of the rocket during tests simulating its launch to space. A September 2019 test at Ames let researchers see and study in more detail than ever before the chaotic airflow SLS will encounter in flight.
Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center/Dominic Hart
Red Rover, Red Rover, Send the Data Right Over
A model of the Space Launch System rocket gets a high-tech paint job at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in California’s Silicon Valley. The pressure-sensitive paint glows according to how much air is blasting against it. Following the white base coat seen here, a pink top coat is applied.
Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center/Jesse Carpenter
In September 2019 at Ames, Roozeboom put her plan to the test with SLS. This rocket will send the Orion spacecraft to the Gateway in lunar orbit, from where the first woman and next man will head to the surface of the Moon aboard a human landing system. The design of SLS is also being tweaked for other missions and types of cargo. For flights that will deliver goods to the Moon, the SLS team needed to test the design for the rocket’s fairing, or nose, specially made to send cargo to deep space. The tests will ensure the rocket will fly safely and protect the cargo inside.
Roozeboom’s job, specifically, is to measure shaking caused by strong and quickly changing pressure from the air a vehicle is pushing through as it travels through the atmosphere to get to space. This tells designers how to build their vehicle to withstand the shaking of a real flight. During her team’s wind-tunnel tests, high-speed cameras captured the changing glow of a high-tech paint that reveals rapidly fluctuating pressure during the rocket’s simulated ascent. The data was saved to a rack of hard drives, but, for the first time, it didn’t stop there.
Aerodynamics engineer Thomas Steva (left) of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and aerospace engineer Nettie Roozeboom (right) of NASA’s Ames Research Center discuss the preliminary data flowing in from a wind tunnel test of the Space Launch System rocket. During a first-of-its-kind demonstration, data from the wind tunnel was sent directly to the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility for real-time visualization of the results. This event illustrated the power of connecting the two facilities: By getting a look at the data right away, future design teams will be able to request immediate adjustments to test conditions in the wind tunnel, ultimately speeding up aircraft and spacecraft design.
Credits: NASA/Advanced Supercomputing Division/Dominic Hart
The demonstration, which Roozeboom named Red Rover – a nod to the children’s recess game – sent as much as 400 terabytes of data straight from the wind tunnel to the supercomputer. That’s 800 times more than the laptop that typed up this story can hold and a record for the live transfer of data like this for immediate processing. Collaborating with the supercomputing experts at the NAS facility was essential for handling it all. They had taken the wind tunnel experts’ usual software for processing pressure-sensitive paint data and optimized it for real-time visualization.
The result: NAS’s supercomputer churned through the data coming in from the wind tunnel and revealed a visualization of the results, practically on the spot. The SLS design team watched on the 1/4 billion-pixel hyperwall – a floor-to-ceiling wall of screens – and immediately consulted with the experts at Ames. When the test conditions didn’t provide precisely the information needed, they were adjusted with a quick message over to the wind tunnel, and new data was collected. All without further ado or delay.
“This could be a tremendous benefit for programs early in the design cycle,” said Thomas Steva, an aerodynamics engineer on the SLS team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama who worked on the Red Rover project. “That’s a time where high-fidelity data is typically sparse.”
Roozeboom will now work closely with SLS team members at two other NASA centers – Marshall and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia – to understand how the data should be processed and packaged to best meet their needs. This will help define what NASA’s commercial partners in both aviation and spacecraft design will need in the future, as the agency develops the new state of the art. Thanks to dual expertise in wind tunnel testing and advanced computing, designs for the Artemis program and more can be forged in real time.
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Author: Abby Tabor, NASA's Ames Research Center
Last Updated: Nov. 8, 2019
Editor: Abigail Tabor
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