The NESC expanded upon work from a previous NESC assessment, TI-12-00770 Development of Verification Data for Flight Simulation. That effort provided benchmark check-cases for well-specified, rigid-body, six-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) aero-spacecraft models to promote consistent and accurate flight simulations across multiple Agency tools and facilities. As more commercial companies provide services for NASA in the cislunar region, providing transportation elements or deploying orbital and lunar surface assets, using validated simulations is crucial to understanding the analyses referenced to meet Program requirements. Utilizing benchmarking check-cases improves the simulations being assessed, reduces errors, builds confidence in solutions, and serves to build credibility of simulation results per NASA Procedural Requirement (NPR) 7009 Models and Simulation (M&S) Standard. NPR 7009 specifies that comparing simulations is a way to validate system performance; this standard states: "Once the computational model is available, the next step is empirical validation, which is the comparison of M&S results with a referent (generally, data from either a real-world simulation, or a 'representative system'). In some instances, e.g., for the development of so-called 'surrogate models', the referent can be the results obtained from a higher-fidelity (and typically computationally expensive) model." Often, validating a simulation against real-world flight or test data can be challenging given the limited opportunities and resources to fly and test, and demonstrating that flight in the desired environments and conditions. Cross-comparisons with different models and simulations with different implementations given the same inputs is a valid domain for simulation validation.

The "Specifications" menu at the top contains descriptions of the simple body models used in this assessment and a complete listing of simulation output parameters, frames and definitions.

The "References" menu at the top contains links to additional information helpful in using the checkcases, map projections and a quaternion to euler transformation.

The "Lunar Checkcases" menu at the top contains all the checkcases, descriptions, raw data files from each of the participating simulations and an interactive plotting feature that allows users to upload their own simulation output data for quick comparison to the other simulation outputs.

Lastly, the "Flight Checkcases" menu is a link to the original NESC Assessment conducted in 2015 that compared simulations for a variety of Earth orbital and atmospheric flight checkcases.

An interim AAS Conference paper describes a summary of this Lunar Check case effort and references the main report linked above.

For more information please contact Dr. Matthew Hawkins and Jason Neuhaus.