Engineering
Jacobs’ engineering teams develop and sustain flight and ground hardware and software for human space flight. The engineering services provided are extensive, including design and fabrication; simulation; software development; thermal, stress, vibration, and loads analysis and testing; communications and data processing; and failure analysis. Applications range from crew health and habitation systems, avionics and instrumentation, cameras, robotic systems, extravehicular activity tool development, and propulsion and power systems.
Software Engineering
Our engineers support software development, systems engineering, simulation lab operations, flight software development oversight, system administration, cybersecurity, network engineering, robotic systems development. We also oversee flight software and avionics systems development being performed by spacecraft vendors. Our robotic systems work includes software development for lunar surface resource prospecting robotic rovers, user interface/user experience/virtual reality systems, robotic dexterous manipulation capabilities and lunar surface astronaut vehicle hardware, software and electronics.
Guidance Navigation & Control, Aerosciences, & Flight Mechanics
Our team ensures the safety of our astronauts through some of the most dangerous aspects of spaceflight. We predict and analyze fluid-to-structure interactions and provide aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic simulations of launch, abort, and re-entry, as well as parachute. Thermal analysis of ISS and Gateway proximity operations are completed to ensure safe visiting vehicle maneuvers. We support the development, test, and verification of GN&C flight software and provide oversight of integrated GN&C performance, as well as certify the flight readiness of spacecraft GN&C systems.
Vehicle Services
Our engineers maintain and operate high-fidelity human-in-the-loop flight simulation labs used for astronaut training and visualization assessments. Our simulations include vehicle displays and controls that are typically built to flight specifications, but we also support rapid-prototyping efforts. The simulations run in both real-time and non-real-time environments, depending on need, and we support remote interactive simulations with other NASA labs.
ISS/Vehicle Flight Robotics Services
Our team provides technical engineering services for the design, analysis, and operations of flight robotic systems and payloads for the International Space Station (ISS) and the new lunar Gateway habitation and logistics outpost, HALO. Our services also include mission planning and flight anomaly investigation. We provide robotic development support for companies with vehicles visiting the ISS that are captured, berthed, and released by the robotics system, including requirements development and verification. In addition, we perform visiting vehicle cargo reviews using our robotics engineering expertise to assist companies with payload integration challenges.