The visualization enhancements provided through this SBIR will make GMAT easier and more enticing to use by mission designers and easier to enhance for software developers. These benefits will expand the GMAT user base and improve Goddard's position as a provider of cutting-edge mission design software. Having robust and high-performance visualizations is especially important during trajectory optimization. In these situations, having an accurate initial guess is so critical to successful optimization that entire research papers are written just on the topic of generating initial guesses. For GMAT, having the ability to visually analyze both initial guesses and iterative trajectory improvements in real time would allow for faster time-to-solution. This would, in turn, make GMAT more desirable as a primary mission design tool for GSFC's (and indeed all NASA centers') upcoming Decadal Earth and Space Science missions in which complex trajectories must be designed to meet increasingly complex science requirements. Furthermore, this SBIR will result in improvements to OpenFrames itself, namely to increase the number of specific graphics elements that can be visualized. Since OpenFrames is Open Source, these improvements can be contributed back to the main OpenFrames project. This will allow other NASA projects that use OpenFrames, currently Copernicus, to potentially benefit from these improvements. Potential Non-NASA Commercialization Apps: 1500 characters / ~150 words max Because GMAT is Open Source, its use by non-NASA entities will also increase due to our SBIR enhancements. Research organizations such as the Air Force Research Laboratory and universities will find GMAT, with its advanced visualization capabilities, a tool of choice for mission design, research, education, and outreach. Emergent will also benefit from GMAT's improved visibility as a result of our SBIR work. We will provide installation and support services for GMAT at external locations, as well as provide on-demand enhancement and integration services for OpenFrames itself.
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