A team of engineers—three from NASA Glenn and one from Boeing Phantom Works—has earned NASA's 2008 Software of the Year Award for the development of a general-purpose program used to perform trajectory performance studies for a wide variety of vehicles, including aircraft, rockets, satellites, and interplanetary vehicles. The prestigious Software of the Year Award recognizes developers of exceptional software created for or by NASA and owned by NASA.
The members of the winning team are John Riehl, Waldy Sjauw and Robert Falck of NASA Glenn, and Stephen Paris of Boeing Phantom Works, Boeing's advanced, central research-and-development organization. The team developed Optimal Trajectories by Implicit Simulation, version 4 (OTIS4), which utilizes state-of-the-art numerical integration and optimization technologies to predict how a vehicle will perform or determine how best to fly it. Data generated by the program allows a variety of studies to be accomplished, including vehicle and subsystem design trades, guidance studies, error analyses, and mission planning. "With OTIS4, users can seamlessly generate optimal trajectories and parametric vehicle designs simultaneously with flight paths to any of the major bodies in the solar system," Falck cited. "OTIS4 also can be used to solve non-aerospace continuous time optimal control problems." The software recently was used to conduct a launch abort analysis of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. Its highly generalized modeling capabilities enable developers to generate more detailed simulation as the vehicle and mission design advance without abandoning the basic simulation framework. More realistic constraints can be added and design options easily traded off to obtain insight into the final design. NASA's In-Space Program funded much of the development for OTIS4, which is widely used throughout the U.S. aerospace industry. However, distribution of this software is subject to export control laws of the country. For more information on OTIS, visit http://otos/grc/.nasa.gov/background.html.
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