NASA’s Europa Lander mission is to search for biosignatures on Europa based on in-situ science using a lander architecture. This mission presents a set of challenges that requires a high level of autonomy on the lander system, leading to the need for a new operational paradigm that supports better collaboration and coordination between the lander and the ground operations team. M\&S is used for both designing the onboard system-level autonomy and the ground operations paradigm that allows effective and efficient collaboration and coordination between the lander and the ground operations team. In this paper, M\&S as applied to the design of new mission and operational concepts will be discussed. At its current early stage of the mission development for Europa Lander, the M\&S is used to explore different mission concepts and gain insights for design (formative) rather than to verify and validate fully designed mission concepts quantitatively (summative). Organically, we established a new approach to mission and operational concept exploration using high-fidelity modeling and simulation. M\&S has been an integral part of the approach of defining constraints and assertions, designing mission concepts, assessing (i.e., simulating them), and discovering insights, which feeds back to the definition an design steps. This organically-established approach provided important benefits to the project at its early phase of the development by enabling the project team to be able to build shared understanding of impacts from design characteristics, constraints, and their interactions on the mission performance.


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    Title :

    Mission Concept Design for Autonomous Space Missions using Mission-Level Modeling and Simulation


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2021-11-15


    Type of media :

    Preprint


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English






    A Mission Planning Concept and Mission Planning System for Future Manned Space Missions

    Wickler, M. / Davidson, A. / International Astronautical Federation | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1994


    A Mission Planning Concept and Mission Planning System for Future Manned Space Missions

    Wickler, M. / Goddard Space Flight Center | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1994