Demos

The Demos folder contains the Mission Plans that are displayed on the FreeFlyer Home Screen under the Demonstration Mission Plans block, as seen below. The available Mission Plans vary based on the Edition of FreeFlyer you are working with: Engineer or Mission. These Mission Plans have been developed to showcase FreeFlyer's visual and computational capabilities.

Mission Plan	Engineer	Mission
Battlespace Communications	•	•
Close Approach Maneuver		•
Constellation Coverage	•	•
Debris Field Visualization	•	•
Earth-to-Moon Analysis	•	•
GPS Operations	•	•
Interstellar Asteroid	•	•
ISS Visualization	•	•
JWST Visualization	•	•
KalmanFilterOD - Lunar TDRS Relay		•
KalmanFilterOD - Pseudorange Point Solution Comparison		•
Lunar Gateway	•	•
MMS Visualization	•	•
Natural Motion Circumnavigation	•	•
NRHO Energy Visualization	•	•
RFLink	•	•
Satellite Breakup Simulation	•	•
SBSS Search	•	•
Slew Maneuver	•	•
Swarm Formation	•	•

Battlespace Communications

The Battlespace Communications Mission Plan demonstrates the use of FreeFlyer to provide a coverage analysis for battlefield scenarios. This scenario presents one spacecraft in a LEO orbit, another in a Polar orbit, and yet another in a Geostationary orbit. Groundstations are set up at Kwajalein, Madrid, and Vandenberg, while a command center is setup in Baghdad. FreeFlyer produces Contact start and end times between both the LEO and Polar spacecraft and the groundstations. Pass Data reports are generated for all three spacecraft and sent to output files.

Close Approach Maneuver

This Mission Plan demonstrates FreeFlyer's ability to parse a Conjunction Data Message (CDM), in JSON or KVN format, to calculate the Time of Closest Approach (TCA) and Probability of Collision (Pc) for a conjunction of two spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Then it is used to plan a Risk Mitigation Maneuver (RMM) to reduce the Pc value to 0 for the calculated TCA and plots the required maneuver size and resulting range at TCA.

Constellation Coverage

This Mission Plan demonstrates how FreeFlyer can be used to dynamically create a constellation of spacecraft and subsequently perform coverage analyses using the created constellation. The constellation is built by the user selecting custom orbital elements, a pre-built constellation, or by inputting a TLE set.

Debris Field Visualization

This Mission Plan demonstrates the use of FreeFlyer to visualize the dispersion of the Fengyun1C, Cosmos, and Iridium debris fields and the orbits of the International Space Station (ISS) and an Earth Observation Satellite (Aura).

Earth-to-Moon Analysis

This analysis demonstrates the use of FreeFlyer to calculate the delta-V costs of transferring a Spacecraft from low-Earth orbit to a lunar mapping orbit. Five different transfer orbit cases are considered.

GPS Operation

This Mission Plan demonstrates the use of FreeFlyer for visualizing the launch and orbit insertion of a GPS satellite. The mission phases are outlined as:

Interstellar Asteroid

This Mission Plan loads in the orbital data for an interesting interstellar asteroid from a SPICE file, and then propagates the asteroid alongside its planetary neighbors to visualize its orbit. The asteroid, 2015 BZ509, is an asteroid in a resonant, retrograde orbit that is co-orbital with Jupiter. It is thought to be the first example of an interstellar asteroid that has been captured in the Solar System, and it flies through both of Jupiter's captured asteroid collections at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of the Jupiter-Sun celestial system. To help visualize the orbit, both a standard 3D Viewpoint and a Rotating Pulsating (RP) Viewpoint are used. The RP view allows you to see the Jupiter-Sun celestial system and how the asteroid intersects it, while the 3D view enables you to easily see the asteroid's orbit relative to the Ecliptic plane.

ISS Visualization

In this International Space Station (ISS) demonstration, FreeFlyer displays a 3D visual of the ISS as it orbits the Earth. As a part of this visualization, the solar arrays are shown tracking the Sun, and arrows representing the ISS velocity vector and sun vector are drawn.

This Mission Plan demonstrates the flight dynamics modeling for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) including necessary station keeping maneuvers to maintain a halo orbit around L2, and how JWST can rotate to look at various stars. A 3D model is used to visualize JWST and the NIRCam & MIRI instruments onboard JWST are modeled as sensors. These are shown on a star map along with the Sun Exclusion Zone; an area within which the instruments cannot point during JWST's mission.

KalmanFilterOD - Lunar TDRS Relay

This Mission Plan demonstrates FreeFlyer's ability to process 4-leg TDRS relay observations using Ground Stations on both the Earth and Moon. Two-way Range and Doppler measurements are simulated and filtered for the DSN stations and a Lunar Base located near the Moon's north pole. This Mission Plan uses external script files, known as Procedures and Macros, to execute generalized sections of FreeFlyer script. The Call command is used to execute the desired Procedure or Macro.

KalmanFilterOD - Pseudorange Point Solution Comparison

This Mission Plan demonstrates the use of the FreeFlyer Orbit Determination system to process Pseudorange and PointSolution tracking data. Both data types are processed in the same Kalman Filter. The orbit separations between the pseudorange and point solution results are plotted and visualized in a close-up 3D view. The wide view shows the GPS constellation and the low Earth orbit of the spacecraft being estimated. Yellow vectors which indicate which GPS satellites are generating pseudorange observation data.

Lunar Gateway

This Mission Plan visualizes the lunar-orbit Gateway, a planned crew-tended outpost at the Moon that will serve as a short-term habitation module, science laboratory, and more. The Gateway will be a proving ground for deep space technology and a staging location for human missions to the lunar surface and beyond the Earth-Moon system. This Mission Plan demonstrates a variety of visualization options, including a rotating view based on the Earth-Moon RotatingLibrationPoint L2, as well as illustrating FreeFlyer's interplanetary capabilities. The Gateway Spacecraft is propagated using an ephemeris.

MMS Visualization

This Mission Plan visualizes the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission. Used for FreeFlyer demos, this Mission Plan shows the user many good tips and tricks for making the most out of FreeFlyer's visualization capabilities. GraphicsOverlay objects illustrate Earth's magnetic field, formation quality, and formation labeling. Also demonstrated is the capability to pan and rotate, necessary for many visualization solutions.

Natural Motion Circumnavigation

This Mission Plan demonstrates a possible maneuver sequence to place a co-planar, near-neighbor chaser satellite ("Deputy") into a natural circumnavigation arrangement with a geosynchronous target satellite ("Chief"). The circumnavigation injection maneuver components are calculated using FreeFlyer's built-in relative motion utility.

A custom UserInterface is used to configure the simulation. Configurable parameters include the Chief satellite's geosynchronous orbit, the initial offset between the Chief and Deputy in km, and the desired minimum standoff range between the Chief and Deputy during circumnavigation.

NRHO Energy Visualization

This Mission Plan demonstrates the use of the GraphicsOverlay object to visualize the magnitude of orbital energy as a function of semi-major axis for Moon-centric orbits. Orbital energy is defined as -Mu/2a. The specific energy of LLO (Low Lunar Orbit) and NRHO (Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit, the planned trajectory for NASA’s Gateway) are plotted within the energy well.

RFLink

This Mission Plan demonstrates how to visually model an antenna's gain using an imported antenna pattern file and plots the downlink power, downlink carrier-to-noise ratio, and the link margin between the transmitter and receiver over time using the RFLink object. The RFLink object also has the ability to determine the Spacecraft gain from an antenna gain pattern or by estimating using the effective isotropically radiated power (EIRP). You are able to visualize antenna models represented by antenna pattern files in the supported formats:

Satellite Breakup Simulation

This analysis demonstrates the use of FreeFlyer to examine the distribution of the debris field following a destructive satellite breakup while on orbit. The debris field being analyzed is generated by applying randomly calculated delta-v's to the initial seed state. For this analysis, 4000 particles are used. The debris field is propagated for a few orbits to visualize the dispersion of the resulting debris over the plane of the orbit. Higher energy particles are colored in red, while lower energy particles are colored blue.

SBSS Search

This Mission Plan shows three potential SBSS spacecraft, in the same orbit plane separated by 120 in anomaly. Five target spacecraft are also shown: three in GEO orbit, two in Walker formation. The demonstration starts by showing one of the SBSS spacecraft and its sensor, which sweeps along the GEO plane looking for targets reflecting sunlight. The sensors always look in the direction opposite to the Sun for the best chance of catching reflections. Targets that are 'reflecting' are shown in yellow; the others are colored black. SBSS will sweep and search for targets that are reflecting and not currently being tracked by other SBSS. Sensors in sweep mode have a half-angle of 45°; the beams narrow when locked onto a target. Views down sensor boresights are shown.

The SBSS are in Sun Sync orbit, always illuminated by the Sun, maximizing look-time toward anti-Sun GEO.

Slew Maneuver

This Mission Plan includes a Procedure that slews a Spacecraft's attitude to look along a specified CoordinateSystem, and this is leveraged in a way that shows an imaging Spacecraft looking at different cities in the United States of America.

In order to visualize and report the slewing information, this Mission Plan propagates a Spacecraft with an attached Sensor in LEO, determines which city of interest is the closest in range to the Spacecraft, and then leverages the SlewSpacecraft Procedure to orient the satellite at a reasonable slewing rate towards that city. A Struct is used to communicate the official name of the city forward through the propagation to ultimately be reported to the Console when the Spacecraft initially begins slewing. Meanwhile, a GraphicsOverlay draws out the actual path of the Spacecraft's slewed Sensor upon the surface of the Earth.

Swarm Formation

This Mission Plan demonstrates a Swarm Formation that has reached its insertion orbit. The Primary satellite will begin orbit raising to achieve the optimal formation for the three satellites. The quality tracker is used to track the Swarm formation, where a value below 0.5 is failing the required formation, a value between 0.5 – 0.75 is getting closer to the ideal formation, and a value greater than 0.75 means the ideal formation is achieved.