APSI Case# 1 : pre-planning science operations in Mars Express

This paper gives a preliminary overview on an ongoing effort to build a planning system to support ESA mission planners in Long Term Planning for Mars Express. The output of the tool is a pre-optimized skeleton plan of the communication windows and spacecraft maintenance slots, that is used as a support in the dialogue between science and operation team in early pre-planning of activities. To capture details of the domain we have specialized the OMPS planning architecture to obtain a rapid prototyping tool that can support the knowledge engineering effort in this domain.