Aerospace Toolbox provides tools and functions for analyzing the navigation and environment of aerospace vehicles and visualizing their flight using standard cockpit instruments or a flight simulator. It lets you import Data Compendium (Datcom) files directly into MATLAB® to represent vehicle aerodynamics and incorporate validated environment models for atmosphere, gravity, wind, geoid height, and magnetic field. You can evaluate vehicle motion and orientation using built-in aerospace math operations and coordinate system and spatial transformations. You can visualize the vehicle in flight directly from MATLAB with standard cockpit instruments and using the pre-built FlightGear Flight Simulator interface.
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Coordinate System Transformations
Use the coordinate system functions to standardize units across data describing flight dynamics and motion, transform spatial representations and coordinate systems, and describe the behavior of three- and six-degrees-of-motion bodies.
Example overlaying simulated and actual flight data.
Flight Parameters
Use functions to estimate aerodynamic flight parameters, such as airspeed, incidence and sideslip angles, Mach number, and relative pressure, density, and temperature ratios.
Example of performing glide calculations.
Quaternion Math
Use built-in quaternion functions to calculate their norm, modulus, natural logarithm, product, division, inverse, power, or exponential. Or you can interpolate between two quaternions using the linear, spherical-linear, or normalized-linear methods.
Creating the world’s first two-way laser optical link at Astrium.
Atmosphere
Use validated environment models, including the COSPAR International Reference Atmosphere 1986, 1976 COESA, International Standard Atmosphere (ISA), Lapse Rate Atmosphere, and 2001 U.S. Naval Research Lab Exosphere, to represent the Earth’s atmosphere.
Supersonic wind tunnel example using the ISA model.
Gravity and Magnetic Field
Calculate gravity and magnetic fields using standard models. Functions let you implement the Earth Geopotential Models, World Magnetic Models, and the International Geomagnetic Reference Field, including EGM2008, WMM2020, and IGRF13. You can also calculate height and undulations based on geoid data downloadable via Add-On Explorer.
Example of geoid height for Earth geopotential model.
Wind
Use the horizontal wind function to implement the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Horizontal Wind Model routine and calculate the meridional and zonal components of the wind for one or more sets of geophysical data.
Example of using the function atmoshwm.
Flight Instruments
Use standard cockpit flight instruments in MATLAB to display navigation variables. Instruments include airspeed, climb rate, and exhaust gas temperature indicators, altimeter, artificial horizon, turn coordinator, and more.
Reviewing prerecorded flight test data or simulation data.
Flight Simulator Interface
The animation object for FlightGear lets you visualize flight data and vehicle motion in a three-dimensional environment.
Example playing back flight data in FlightGear.
Celestial Phenomena Functions
With Chebyshev coefficients obtained from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you can use MATLAB to compute the position and velocity of solar system bodies relative to a specified center object for a given Julian date, as well as Earth nutation and Moon libration.
Image from Marine Navigation Using Planetary Ephemerides example, which outlines the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition.
Digital Datcom Data
Import aerodynamic coefficients from static and dynamic analyses and transfer them into MATLAB as a cell array of structures containing information about a Datcom output file.
Importing Datcom files.
igrfmagm Function
Implement the 13th Generation of the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF-13) in MATLAB
wrldmagm Function
Implement the World Magnetic Model 2020 in MATLAB
Flight Instruments in App Designer
Create user interfaces in MATLAB for aerospace-specific applications
Supersonic Airspeed Correction
Convert between equivalent, calibrated, or true airspeed
Polar Motion
Calculate the movement of rotation axis with respect to the Earth crust according to IAU2000A
Celestial Intermediate Pole Location
Calculate adjustment to the celestial intermediate pole location according to IAU2000A
See the release notes for details on any of these features and corresponding functions.
Researchers Test Control Algorithms for NASA SPHERES Satellites with a MATLAB Based Simulator
For NASA, developing satellite trajectory optimization and control algorithms with MATLAB and related toolboxes is about twice as fast as developing them with languages that require everything to be coded from scratch.
