Development of a 3D/AR Visualization Tool for Thermal Vacuum Tests of Spacecrafts

Kurzfassung

During the development of spacecraft, it is mandatory that they have to pass a number of important tests. The European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) provides guidelines for this, which are followed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). One of the tests is the thermal vacuum test (TVAC test). This takes place in a thermal-vacuum chamber where temperatures between -180°C and 120°C and a high vacuum of 10^-6 bar can be generated. The test is designed to simulate space conditions while testing the functionality of all equipment. The temperatures of the spacecraft must be monitored during the test. For this purpose, a system was developed as part of this master's thesis that can acquire, store, and present the resulting data in a variety of ways. The core hardware system named The Rack contains 25 PID controllers and 7 power supplies. These can be used to measure temperatures via sensors and control heating mats. A backend processes the data and stores it in an InfluxDB database. On the one hand, the measured temperature data is displayed in the form of diagrams via a web-based software Grafana. On the other hand, two visualization tools were developed that use other types of representation than diagrams. One of the tools is a Graphical User Interface. It could be proven by two experiments that the developed system is functional and has sufficient accuracy.