The proposed tool kit has applications in a wide range of industries besides NASA, including aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, atmospheric data assimilation and economic modeling, etc., where sensors are commonly used to collect a large quantity of raw data which need to be processed with filtering techniques. Specific examples of non-NASA applications may include marine vessel navigation, commercial airliner navigation, seismic data acquisition and analysis, atmospheric observation data collection and processing, and so on. The fact that the tool kit is built in a generic environment makes it readily applicable to any of these areas. Existing tools can also be enhanced by incorporating the advanced filtering modules provided in the proposed tool kit.
Expected NASA applications are in the areas of spacecraft and aircraft navigation analyses. The intended modular nature of the tool kit allows for a wide variety of applications, including ground or onboard facilities to process navigational data from multiple sensor sources, and analysis and testing of flight software and onboard data processing algorithms. Existing NASA software packages such as GPS-Enhanced Onboard Navigation Software (GEONS) may benefit from these advanced filtering techniques by interchanging the native navigation processor with one chosen from the proposed tool kit.
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