Rapid SmallSat Mission Formulation: Integrated and Concurrent Modeling in JPL's Team Xc

The Innovation Foundry at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is developing a new tool suite for rapid concurrent and collaborative spacecraft mission architecture design with Team Xc. Team Xc is JPL's agile and rapid design team for Earth orbiting and interplanetary CubeSat and SmallSat missions of “ESPA-class” (approximately 180 kg mass) and below. Previously successful spacecraft designs that have come from Team Xc include the MarCO CubeSat mission that traveled with the Insight lander to Mars in 2018, as well as the RainCube mission that continues to operate successfully in Earth orbit. Since Team Xc began in 2013, concurrent design models and data transfer across spacecraft subsystems have been critical to its success as a rapid design center. These models allow engineers to collaborate and share information, enabling the construction of a self-consistent design by passing parameters such as mass and power between study participants. The current model framework is built using Excel and Phoenix ModelCenter, but JPL has embarked on a multi-year effort to migrate these models to a new web-based framework that gives more flexibility, features, speed, and performance. Called the Foundry Furnace, this framework is composed of three main applications: the Integrated Modeling Environment, which allows study participants to build spacecraft designs and create analysis models, the Hardware Catalog, which stores spacecraft hardware components and their associated parameters across subsystems, and the Common Resources Database, which defines the ontology that allows the individual applications to communicate with each other across a common language. The Foundry Furnace is enabling a new model architecture for Team Xc, one that allows study participants to conduct integrated analyses and trade studies across subsystems, such as resizing required reaction wheel torques based on the size of the solar arrays, within the same modeling environment. Study participants also have access to a rich catalog of hardware items which can be expanded over time as new systems become available. This paper will provide an overview of the Foundry Furnace architecture, with particular emphasis on the construction and integration of Team Xc models across multiple subsystems. Current results indicate that the model framework shows great promise in its applications moving forward, as Team Xc transitions to using it operationally for customers.