Lander Simulation

Flight Safety Zones

From Inner Most to Outer Most:

Safety Clear Zone (domes on the launch and landing pads): Where the team works without any other personnel within that zone while the rocket is grounded.

Soft Abort Zone (inner most yellow polygon): This is where the rocket has the pilot override and try to get it to teh landing pad mnually.

Hard Abort Zone (inner most blue polygon): This is where the Primary Dead Man's Switch is triggered because it has deviated from the planned flight path in such a manner as to be dangerous.

Operating Area (outer most yellow polygon): This is the area large enough to contain all the potential debris from the instanteous impact point analysis.

Flight Hazard Zone (out most blue polygon): The outer bubble for safety based on FAA regulations.

There's a lot of detail we are leaving out, okay a massive amount, but this ought to give you some eye candy and some insight into what and why the paperwork is so hefty to fly even a bitty rocket like our own.

The Wind at Dawn Flight Simulations

When we set out to enter the Lunar Lander Challenge, we had to do a lot of work to design The Wind at Dawn. There was a whole month spent working out some of the really basic equations and then translating them into some simulations of the flight based on changing mass, throttling, thrust profiles, wind, and several other factors. It was interesting work because it was all tied together. If you consume propellant, the amount of thrust needed to flight at a given height decreases which causes throttling changes which changes the amount of propellant that is to be used. etc. In the end, we had a series of numbers for given time frame snapshots. These were heights, lateral displacements, throttling requirements, thrust, etc. We took these to the ever talented Scott E of Coherent Lighthouse and his nice little IRIX cluster. He did a crazy bang up job and produced the following visualizations of the event.



The first visualization is if you had a 'travel camera' that was back about 3m or so that would allow you to focus on the vehicle as it lifted off and keep altitudal pace with it. Unfortunately, the viz machines choked part way through and we had a deadline, so the video is incomplete. Since the flight isn't really that interesting from this POV, we asked if he'd just give us what he had.



The second visualization is from the point of view of an observer 250m away from the flight path of The Wind at Dawn. This video shows the whole flight.

Let's say that we strongly recommend the work of Scott Elyard. He's a hard worker, able to get work done on short notice, and a good guy all around.