Minimizing Navigation Sub-System (NSS) Costs Via B-2 Flight Simulations

Ted Hagstrom, Mitch Miller, Doug Atkinson

Abstract:	The B-2 Navigation Sub-System (NSS) is highly complex avionics system with many operational modes and corresponding performance requirements. Each mode’s performance is dependent on measurements from B-2 avionics sensors such as the Star Tracker, the Global Positioning System (GPS), the Radar Altimeter, and the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). To demonstrate and verify the performance of all usable combinations of these sensors requires numerous, costly, B-2 verification flight tests. A typical inertial navigation flight test program requires a minimum of 6 flights for each mode variation for verification of navigation performance (excluding development flight tests). With this approach the B-2 NSS would have required considerably in excess of 600 hours of dedicated verification flight test. The original allocation of flight test hours for NSS testing was only 250 hours. This drove the need to develop modeling and simulation tools to maximize the utility of each and every flight test hour. By utilizing analysis simulators and post processing software tools emulating the NSS Operational Flight Program (OFP), the number of flight tests required to confidently demonstrate NSS performance for all the operating modes was substantially reduced. In fact these tools proved so effective the total number of dedicated NSS flight test hours was reduce to 170 hours. This significantly reduced the overall cost to develop and certify the NSS. This paper provides a detailed overview of the NSS Analysis Laboratory delineating the development and use of NSS analysis simulation tools for reprocessing flight test data in various operating modes. The post flight simulation process is described along with sample results.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 1997 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 14 - 16, 1997 Loews Santa Monica Hotel Santa Monica, CA
Pages:	803 - 817
Cite this article:	Hagstrom, Ted, Miller, Mitch, Atkinson, Doug, "Minimizing Navigation Sub-System (NSS) Costs Via B-2 Flight Simulations," Proceedings of the 1997 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Santa Monica, CA, January 1997, pp. 803-817.
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