A Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator for Software Development for a Mars Airplane

Draper Laboratory recently developed a Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulator (HILSIM) to provide a simulation of the Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey (ARES) airplane executing a mission in the Martian environment. The HILSIM was used to support risk mitigation activities under the Planetary Airplane Risk Reduction (PARR) program. PARR supported NASA Langley Research Center's (LaRC) ARES proposal efforts for the Mars Scout 2011 opportunity. The HILSIM software was a successful integration of two simulation frameworks, Draper's CSIM and NASA LaRC's Langley Standard Real-Time Simulation in C++ (LaSRS++).