Emergent develops high
fidelity tools for modeling spacecraft orbit and attitude dynamics.
Tools such as the JAT and ODTBX provide low cost alternatives to other
commercially available packages. Emergent employees are also providing
GN&C engineering support to NASA missions such as the Hubble
Space Telescope.
Java Astrodynamics Toolkit
Emergent’s Dr. David Gaylor is a co-founder of the open source the Java
Astrodynamics Toolkit (JAT). The JAT provides a library of reusable
components for the rapid development of 3-DOF and 6-DOF spacecraft
simulations including 2-D and 3-D visualization. JAT is licensed under
the GNU General Public License and is available at: http://jat.sourceforge.net/
Emergent is part of
a team headed by Lockheed Martin to work on the
Hubble Space Telescope Lifetime Extension Initiative for NASA.
Emergent is currently studying the feasibility study of a new
safemode called zero-gyro Kalman filter that is a significant
improvement over the current zero-gyro sun point safemode. The
new mode uses the magnetometer and sun sensor measurements in a Kalman
filter to produce accurate estimates of the HST attitude and rate to
feed into the sun pointing controller.
Orbit Determination Toolbox
Emergent is
developing the Orbit Determination Toolbox (ODTBX), which is based on
Matlab and Java. The objective of this effort is to provide a more
extensible and flexible way to perform early mission analysis than is
currently possible with existing tools. Matlab is the primary user
interface, and is used for implementing new measurement and dynamic
models. ODTBX uses well-defined measurement and process model
interfaces to enable analysis of next generation space missions by
making it easy to integrate new models, written in either Matlab or
Java, into the toolbox.
