CosmoScout VR: Interactivity and Immersion for Space Data Exploration and Mission Planning

Abstract

Many institutes of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has been working in earth system modeling, planetary research, atmospheric research, space mission planning, space operation, on-orbitservicing, space situational awareness, air-borne observation, and sensor-data related applications. The observation and simulation data can become extremely large. Additionally, heterogeneous data exploitation requires software solutions which are distributed, scalable, and reliable. Already 10 years ago, the DLR Institute of Simulation and Software Technology realized the need to process the huge High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) dataset on a global scale on a sphere in virtual environments. HRSC is a DLR camera sensor on the Mars Express orbiter capturing stripes of the surface of Mars with extraordinarily precise specification of slopes. An accurate data exploration requires a distortion free mapping also on the poles and appropriate tools for measuring, annotation, and navigation. To close gaps between stripes, arbitrary sensor datasets can be merged on the fly to one data product. Virtual reality devices have been integrated to sense the height-field for accurate measurements and to deform the terrain interactively for reconstructing 3D fault displacements. Autonomous crater detection based moon lander required simulators with physical-based Moon rendering. And for Earth observation data, the interactive terrain renderer has been extended with approaches for atmospheric volumetric and time-depended data visualization. Climate research datasets exceeds Peta-bytes of data, so that the framework has been extended to remote highperformance post-processing on supercomputers. And finally, space mission planning demanded the visualization of the whole solar system with accurate time-dependent trajectory specifications based on SPICE kernels. High-resolution star maps allow space system simulators which rely on star trackers. On-orbit servicing (OOS) simulation of spacecraft requires photo-realistic rendering of the scenario in space. All these features are now available in the open-source software framework CosmoScout VR. It works as a stand-alone application. With its plug-in concept, it additionally enables the extension of arbitrary functionalities. But as it comes as a set of libraries, tailored applications for specific purpose can be implemented as well. With the basic VR software layer, it always scales from single laptop application to CAVE-like immersive multi-projection systems. And finally, it is platform independent and supports Windows and Linux operating systems. Thus, CosmoScout VR is available for all who are interested in a holistic solution to explore the solar system in 3D and time. The talk gives an insight about the approaches to render huge data interactively but with highest precision. It also presents some of many of its application from observation data exploitation to OOS planning and operation.