Early Infusion of New Planning, Scheduling and Execution Technology into A Flight Mission

This extended abstract describes efforts to infuse new planning and scheduling technologies into the Mars Science Laboratory Mission (MSL), a NASA Mars rover mission planned for launch in 2009. Beginning in 2003, we engaged the MSL mission and the developers of the Mission Data System (MDS). MDS is a software system that at the time was the MSL software baseline for both the ground and flight system. We briefly describe the tools that we integrated with MDS, the analysis or experience on previous missions that suggested each tool, and our successes in integrating these tools into a proof-of-concept uplink system we demonstrated in late 2004. In 2004, MSL decided to fall back on the very successful Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission’s software in order to save development cost, which has resulted in some re-direction of our on-going activities. We briefly describe our new work to enhance the MER-based MSL software.