Creo Customers: NASA Bids Atlantis Farewell

by Geoff Hedges

You've seen the news. On Thursday, July 21, 2011, the Atlantis landed in Florida marking the end of NASA's 30-year space shuttle program. But if you think it's the end of America's active involvement in the "out there," you haven't been reading beyond the headlines.

With STS-135, that is, the final flight of the Atlantis, the U.S. has completed construction of the International Space Station. The ISS is a cooperative effort by 15 countries and though the U.S. has grounded its human space flights, it expects to continue sending  Americans to the station until at least 2020--they'll just get there via Russian rockets rather than U.S. shuttles.

Then there's the robots
A lot of what goes on at the space station is done with robots.  You can send an unmanned vehicle and one of the space station's big robotic arms can catch and dock your craft.  Smaller arms take on finer motor tasks, like trying to refuel satellites (that were never built for refuelling).

How do they model robotic arms and payloads in virtual space? I'm very proud to tell you they use PTC's Creo's direct modeling approach. The engineers at NASA typically import STEP files into Creo, simplify, and then exported the data as VRML files. It was important to NASA engineers to "maintain a high degree of dimensional accuracy in our models due to their use in procedure development and clearance monitoring--a necessity when doing operations such as capturing ... and docking to the ISS" says John Rollfe, robotics analyst. Go to Creo's blog to read the full article.