Virtual Engineering Centre host NASA Simulation Exploitation Experience 2016

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The Virtual Engineering Centre was proud to host this year’s NASA SEE (Simulation Exploration Experience) challenge at our facilities in the University of Liverpool’s School of Engineering, 21st-23rd March 2016. SEE is a unique opportunity for students to take part in a NASA-led simulated lunar mission using distributed network simulation.

During that time we hosted some of the participating teams (Facens University Brazil and Brunel University) for two days of testing network connections and practice runs for the SEE event, culminating in the successful final simulation mission, with participants spanning three continents, which took place at 4pm on Wednesday, 23rd March 2016.

The Liverpool team, which consisted of VEC and UoL staff and students, was one of several university teams from all over the world who were working in conjunction with each other, industry partners and NASA to design, develop, test and execute a simulated lunar mission.

This year, the Liverpool team joined the event with several federates, which included simulating an autonomous subterranean explorer and a manned lunar rover which was controlled from the Flight Simulation group’s six-axis motion platform.

Dr Neil Cameron, Research Team Leader with the VEC, said:  “This challenge, led by NASA, champions collaborative university-level modelling and simulation by providing a venue for students to work in highly dispersed inter-university teams to design, develop, test, and execute a simulated lunar mission. It offers students a wonderful first-hand experience, knowledge and skills of working with NASA, industry partners and academic advisors. This is an annual challenge and anyone (staff or student) from the University who is interested in being part of next year’s SEE should get in touch with me.”

 

View photos of the event here.