BOULDER, Colo. — A University of Colorado Boulder student has designed a tool to plan routes from Earth to the Moon using an augmented reality headset.
Dezell Turner designed ASTROMECH to be user-friendly, almost like Google Maps for planning space missions.
Using a VR Headset, Turner can quickly plot hologram routes represented in purple, yellow and red lines from Earth to the Moon based on a spacecraft's speed and fuel. Turner said augmented reality holograms are easier to understand than traditional 2D maps when it comes to space travel.
“The thing about space is that not only is it not flat, but you can't really fly straight through it. Gravity kind of doesn't let you do that. For instance, in routes between the Earth and the Moon, your spacecraft is being pulled on by the Earth and the Moon at the same time. When it's caught in this tug of war, then the routes can get really weird in how they're shaped,” Turner explained.
ASTROMECH is named after a droid from the Star Wars films.
“It stands for Astrodynamic Software for Trade, Space Optimization and Manual Exploration using Computer Holograms, and I worked really hard to get all the letters to fit in there,” Turner explained.
Turner hopes ASTROMECH will help aerospace companies pick the best route based on a spacecraft's speed and fuel costs. With NASA planning to send humans back to the Moon in the next decade, he hopes ASTROMECH becomes applicable in the field.
“I think a really good potential customer would be a group like the Space Force where they have a lot of guardians coming in with maybe a high school diploma. Not a lot of them have astrodynamics experience when they come in, and so a tool like this could help them get trained up a little bit more quickly,” Turner said.
He has previewed the tool at conferences and is still working to perfect it.
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