DOI: 10.48577/jpl.y75au7
title: Maneuver Development Orchestration for the Europa Clipper Mission

description: The Europa Clipper mission employs over 250 maneuversto transport the spacecraft to Jupiter’s orbit and navigateflybys of the Jovian satellites. The science conducted during the4.3-year tour phase is enabled by strategic use of deterministicand stochastic maneuvers, sometimes placed only days apart.This operations paradigm demands an agile, accurate, robustand flexible ground maneuver development capability that isable to respond efficiently to a high volume of design demands.MAST, the Maneuver Automation Systems Tool, is designed tooperate within a carefully constructed maneuver implementationparadigm to support this capability for the Clipper mission.The maneuver implementation process dictates the generation,verification, and validation of the maneuver uplink products. Inthe most restrictive timeline, the orchestration of these products,including validation, is constrained to a tight 8-hour windowthat could occur during non-standard work shifts. Thus, theprimary 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 deliveraccurate products in a time-sensitive operations regime that alsoallows for a smaller, more efficient operations team.The staged-planning efforts begin by initially specifying maneuverkeep-out zones prior to launch in the Clipper ReferenceActivity Plan (RAP), a blueprint for all the planned events ina given timeframe. The latest navigation knowledge in conjunctionwith ongoing resource trending and reconstruction effortsinform the modification of planned activities within a maneuverblock. These activities are translated to spacecraft commandsthat then enable the flight system to prepare for and executea maneuver, as well as reconfigure the spacecraft to a postmaneuverstate. An adaptation of NASA’s Advanced Multi-Mission Operations System (AMMOS) is leveraged to trackfinite resources consumed during maneuver execution and othermission requirements. Hardware-in-the-loop testbed verificationis also leveraged during the design cycles.MAST manages the time criticality associated with maneuverdevelopment by coordinating efficient data relay betweenvarious operations tools. MAST is an interactive and semiautomatedground orchestration tool that consists of a multiuserfront-end GUI that interfaces with a singular backendAPI. The multi-user functionality allows parallel yet restrictedpermutations of maneuver initial conditions to support timesensitiveoperations. The backend facilitates the actions of eachuser to maintain consistency. Simultaneously, it also executesthe sub-tasks of each run, including gathering initial conditions,managing dependencies between different subsystem tools, runningsimulations and generating reports. A discrete task completionapproach enables MAST’s self-cognizance of its locationin a run, allowing new users to pick up where others left off. Theclose coordination between MAST and subsystem analysis toolsdeveloped by navigation, propulsion, and Guidance, Navigation&Control (GN&C), as well as the AMMOS-adapted uplink toolsuite,enables an efficient maneuver development paradigm onClipper.