Maneuver Development Orchestration for the Europa Clipper Mission

The Europa Clipper mission employs over 250 maneuvers to transport the spacecraft to Jupiter's orbit and navigate flybys of the Jovian satellites. The science conducted during the 4.3-year tour phase is enabled by strategic use of deterministic and stochastic maneuvers, sometimes placed only days apart. This operations paradigm demands an agile, accurate, robust and flexible ground maneuver development capability that is able to respond efficiently to a high volume of design demands. MAST, the Maneuver Automation Systems Tool, is designed to operate within a carefully constructed maneuver implementation paradigm to support this capability for the Clipper mission. The maneuver implementation process dictates the generation, verification, and validation of the maneuver uplink products. In the most restrictive timeline, the orchestration of these products, including validation, is constrained to a tight 8-hour window that could occur during non-standard work shifts. Thus, the primary considerations for maneuver implementation include: (i) staged-planning efforts to incorporate long-term, mid-term, and short-term knowledge as they become available, and (ii) efficient interactions within the uplink planning suite to deliver accurate products in a time-sensitive operations regime allowing for a smaller, more efficient operations team. The staged-planning efforts begin by initially specifying maneuver keep-out zones prior to launch in the Clipper Reference Activity Plan (RAP), a blueprint for all the planned events in a given timeframe. The latest navigation knowledge in conjunction with ongoing resource trending and reconstruction efforts inform the modification of planned activities within a maneuver block. These activities are translated to spacecraft commands that then enable the flight system to prepare for and execute a maneuver, as well as reconfigure the spacecraft to a post-maneuver state. An adaptation of NASA's Advanced Multi-Mission Operations System (AMMOS) is leveraged to track finite resources consumed during maneuver execution and other mission requirements. Hardware-in-the-loop testbed verification further aids these design cycles. MAST manages the time criticality associated with maneuver development by coordinating efficient data relay between various operations tools. MAST is an interactive and semi-automated ground orchestration tool that consists of a multi-user front-end GUI that interfaces with a singular backend via an API. The multi-user functionality allows parallel yet restricted permutations of maneuver initial conditions to support time-sensitive operations. The backend facilitates the actions of each user to maintain consistency. Simultaneously, it also executes the sub-tasks of each run, including gathering initial conditions, managing dependencies between different subsystem tools, running simulations and generating reports. A discrete task completion approach enables MAST's self-cognizance of its location in a run, allowing new users to pick up where others left off. The close coordination between MAST and subsystem analysis tools developed by navigation, propulsion, and Guidance, Navigation & Control (GN&C), as well as the AMMOS-adapted uplink tool-suite, enables an efficient maneuver development paradigm on Clipper.