Over the summer, Palski engineering student interns from Penn State and Rochester Institute of Technology created a scene generator widget to be added into Palski’s US Space Training Application. This widget will provide a pictorial view of spacecraft location during simulations, which will help students understand use of independent measurement sources to recognize real- world estimation anomalies that can often cause mission failure.
To complete this project, the intern team had to learn about camera specifications like field of view and instantaneous field of view, sensitivity, image generation & processing, and how to update the pre-existing US Space Training Application code to add the functionality of the Simulator widget. Back-end analytics were developed in C++ and Image generation was developed using OpenGL, which is a cross-platform API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, and OpenCV, which is a comprehensive library of programming functions for real-time computer vision. The interns are excited to have worked on something this summer that will provide real value to Military Space Training.