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.
Vehicle Motion Analysis
Analyze vehicle flight dynamics and motion in MATLAB using aerospace coordinate system transformations, flight parameters, and quaternion math.
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.
Environment Models
Use validated environment models to represent standard gravity and magnetic field profiles, to obtain atmospheric variables for a given altitude, and to implement the horizontal wind model of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
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 field using standard models, such as the 1984 World Geodetic System, 1996 Earth Geopotential Model (EGM96), or World Magnetic Models (WMM), and download ephemeris data to calculate geoid height and undulations.
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 Visualization
Visualize the motion of aerospace vehicles using standard cockpit flight instruments and the FlightGear flight simulator.
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.
Planetary Ephemerides
Use solar system ephemeris data to calculate position and velocity of planets for a given Julian date, and to describe Earth nutation and Moon libration motions.
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.
Import Datcom Files
Use coefficients obtained from the Digital Data Compendium (Datcom) based on vehicle flight conditions and geometry to estimate its aerodynamic stability and control characteristics.
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.
Latest Features
Flight Instruments
Display measurements in UI figure windows using standard cockpit instruments
Polar Motion
Calculate the movement of rotation axis with respect to the Earth crust according to IAU2000A
Supersonic Airspeed Correction
Convert between equivalent, calibrated, or true airspeed
Celestial Intermediate Pole Location
Calculate adjustment to the celestial intermediate pole location according to IAU2000A
FlightGear Interface
Includes support for Version 2018.1 through flight simulator objects
See the release notes for details on any of these features and corresponding functions.
NASA SPHERES
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.
Have Questions?
Contact Greg Drayer Andrade, Aerospace Blockset Technical Expert
