The centerpiece of the NASA Center for Climate Simulation is the over 127,232-core “Discover” supercomputing cluster, an assembly of multiple Linux scalable units built upon commodity components capable of nearly 8.1 petaflops, or 8,100 trillion floating-point operations per second. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
NASA plays an important role in the development of AAM by identifying key research areas and conceptualizing the design of AAM vehicles. Recent simulations focus on the performance of tiltwing and quiet single-main rotor AAM concept vehicles. Simulations were carried out on the supercomputers, such as Aitken, at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, which allowed such complex simulations to be solved in just a few days.
Using the agency’s Aitken supercomputer, engineers at Ames are developing the capability to reduce risk and cost by simulating and analyzing many scenarios of supersonic parachute inflation, which would be too costly to study using flight tests. Another advantage to simulations is that fine-scale details can be extracted —that information can help engineers develop next-generation EDL systems able to handle the heavier payloads of future robotic Mars missions, like Mars Sample Return.
The intense tropical cyclone Hagibis in the western Pacific Ocean reached super typhoon status on Oct. 7, 2019. The inset image is a visible-light satellite image from the Himarawi-8 satellite on Oct. 10, 2019. The larger image is a visible cloud image produced by the experimental GEOS model. Hagibis has a well-defined eye, filled with shallow, low-level clouds surrounded by deep convective bands and a long stream of clouds being drawn into an extratropical frontal system to the northeast.