At NASA’s NAS (Nasa Advanced Supercomputing) Division, engineers are thinking ahead.
Way ahead.
That’s right: they’re thinking about sending a next-generation spacecraft to Mars.
Now, imagine you’re on the spacecraft they build. You’re approaching the CO2 atmosphere of Mars at Mach 15 in the Hypersonic Ballistic Range. There’s a bit of turbulence out there—okay, a lot of turbulence. What’s going through your mind?
If you’re anything like us, you’ll be thinking you’re pretty glad that the engineers who built your ship had a good understanding of what it would go through and were able to design accordingly.
And that’s where Tecplot comes in. NASA engineers used Tecplot 360 to create the complex visualization simulations that took their design to the next level.
And their resulting numerical simulation won the VizPic of the Week from NASA.
Our congratulations to investigators Steven Yoon and Michael Barnhardt of the NASA Ames Research Center.
To read more about the large number of grid points required to visualize the small turbulent scales in this study, click here. The article also discusses the necessity of using NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer to perform a simulation of the fine grid resolutions.