Mission Operations Digital Twin for Decision Making (MODT)

The proposed innovation is to design and demonstrate an End-to-End Space Mission Operations Digital Twin (MODT) Platform for collaborative multi-disciplinary analysis and decision making in Mission Control. This platform will provide situational awareness across the flight control team and crew, through a hyper-realistic, multi-user, multi-modal virtual environment that integrates existing (and future) data and analysis tools. MODT will facilitate multiple simultaneous missions anywhere in the solar system within the same interacting space environment, such as Gateway, lunar surface, and other spacecraft in cislunar space. It can support training simulations, real-time operations, as well as “What-If” scenario analysis with human-in-the-loop simulation. The goal of Phase 1 is to demonstrate the MODT platform architecture in action for specific and realistic decision making scenarios involving multiple disciplines.

The Mission Operations Digital Twin (MODT) aligns with NASA’s Strategic Plan – especially related to human exploration and space technologies. It also supports NASA’s Digital Transformation efforts. Our MODT concept provides flight controllers, crew, and mission engineers with virtual mission awareness using XR technologies, while integrating multiple data sources, and live (or simulated) telemetry. This platform will provide an unparalleled collaborative environment for mission evaluation, decision making, mission execution and training

The proposed Digital Twin based Decision Support toolset that enables the collaboration between multiple disciplines has direct application to industrial complex and dynamic systems development for space, air, sea, ground applications. Examples include aircraft, naval surface and subsea vessels, ground facilities for chemical, medical plants etc.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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