Supporting the future of Mars exploration with supercomputers

You’ll have flown a flight simulator in a pc sport or at a science museum. Touchdown with out crashing is all the time the toughest half. However that is nothing in comparison with the problem that engineers are going through to develop a flight simulation of the very giant automobiles obligatory for people to discover the floor of Mars. The Purple Planet poses innumerable challenges to astronauts, not the least of which is getting there.

That is the place the Division of Vitality Workplace of Science’s consumer facility supercomputers are available. Researchers at DOE’s Oak Ridge Management Computing Facility (OLCF) are working with NASA engineers and scientists to simulate the method of slowing down a huge spacecraft because it strikes in the direction of Mars’ floor.

Touchdown spacecraft on Mars is not new to NASA. The company ran its first missions to the planet in 1976 with the Viking undertaking. Since then, NASA has efficiently carried out eight extra Mars landings.

What makes this objective completely different is the truth that it is way more troublesome to land the large spacecraft required for human exploration than these for robotic missions. The robotic automobiles use parachutes to decelerate by means of Mars’ environment. However a spacecraft carrying people shall be about 20 to 50 instances heavier.

A automobile this massive merely cannot use parachutes. As a substitute, NASA might want to depend on retro-propulsion. This expertise makes use of rockets that fireside ahead to decelerate the automobile because it approaches the floor.

A variety of challenges include utilizing retro propulsion. The high-energy rocket engine exhaust interacts with each the automobile and the Martian environment. These dynamics change how the workforce must information and management the automobile. As well as, engineers cannot absolutely replicate how a flight on Mars would go on Earth. Whereas they’ll take a look at spacecraft in wind tunnels and use different instruments, these instruments aren’t an ideal substitute or direct analog for the Martian atmosphere.

To fill within the gaps, NASA turned to the OLCF supercomputers and their knowledgeable laptop scientists. In concept, applications operating on supercomputers might absolutely simulate the Martian atmosphere and lots of the complicated physics related to utilizing retropropulsion.

The undertaking workforce has relied on FUN3D, a long-standing suite of software program instruments that fashions how fluids—together with air—transfer. Engineers created the primary model of the code within the late Nineteen Eighties and have regularly made main enhancements since then. Companies and corporations in aeronautics and space technology have used it to deal with main challenges.

The present Mars effort started in 2019 on Summit, OLCF’s quickest laptop on the time. The preliminary simulations assumed mounted situations. They simulated only one level alongside the automobile’s trajectory. These early variations allowed scientists to guage the impacts of flight speeds, engine settings, and extra. Additional developments enabled engineers to discover actual gasoline results.

They might account for the liquid oxygen-methane rocket engines and the carbon dioxide-heavy Martian environment. Even these early simulations sometimes resulted in petabyte-sized datasets. It might take about 1,000 highly effective residence computer systems to retailer a single petabyte. However even these weren’t full simulations—that wasn’t attainable but.

The subsequent step was to include a complete new piece of software program into the simulation—the Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories (POST2). NASA developed POST2 to research flight mechanics for a broad vary of purposes. Whereas preliminary simulations relied on static situations, POST2 allowed scientists to dynamically “fly” the automobile within the simulation. The workforce engaged researchers from Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Techniques Design Laboratory.

That they had beforehand developed distinctive methods to couple POST2 with high-fidelity aerodynamic simulations. Incorporating POST2 additionally required engineers to vary the undertaking workflow. The software program’s use was restricted to NASA computing techniques for safety causes. As such, the workforce wanted to make sure the NASA techniques might talk easily with Summit at OLCF.

Resolving points with firewalls, community interruptions, and different applications required a full 12 months of planning for the cybersecurity and system administration groups at each services!

The newest advance concerned shifting your entire simulation over to the latest and strongest laptop at OLCF—Frontier. The primary exascale laptop on the earth, Frontier is massively extra highly effective than earlier supercomputers. With a sequence of coordinated runs over a two-week interval, the workforce ran its most elaborate flight simulation to this point.

It was a 35-second closed-loop descent from 5 miles altitude to roughly 0.6 miles. The simulation slowed the automobile from 1,200 miles per hour to roughly 450 miles per hour. POST2 was in a position to autonomously management the automobile in a steady style utilizing its eight major engines and 4 response management system modules.

With the immense energy supplied by Frontier at OLCF, NASA engineers are shifting ahead to deal with new frontiers in space journey.