TetrUSS Stacks Up Building Blocks for Aircraft Design

Anyone who excelled at the Game Boy’s top-selling video game will recall the animated rocket liftoffs that celebrated high scores. In addition to simulated rocketry and the name, NASA’s TetrUSS code has one other commonality with Tetris: unrivaled popularity.The program is NASA’s most-downloaded software. It helps design aircraft and spacecraft, but it’s also been used to make cars, trucks and buildings, to model bird flight and even investigate plane crashes. The software has around 10,000 active software usage agreements across the country, estimates Craig Hunter, an aerospace engineer at Langley Research Center who has contributed to the program over the years.Since NASA’s early days, the agency has led the way in modeling and simulation software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which models aerodynamic forces and flight performance. The software saves enormous amounts of money, ensures safer, more efficient products, and makes the design process more flexible. The agency has...