Planning Applications for Three Mars Missions with Ensemble

Abstract

A number of new tactical planning and operations tools were deployed on the highly successful Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. Based on successes and lessons from the MER experience, a number of groups at NASA Ames and JPL have developed a platform for developing integrated operations tools, called Ensemble. Ensemble is a multi-mission toolkit for building activity planning and sequencing systems that is being deployed on extended operations for the MER mission, the 2007 Phoenix Mars Lander and the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory rover mission. Experience designing, building and operating the MER tools with our colleagues, studying the use of the MER tools from a Human/Computer Interaction perspective, and feedback from these three missions has lead us to take a somewhat different approach to designing and deploying applications with planning technology this time around. We believe these changes will make future applications even more efficient to use and easier to implement. This experience may be of use and interest to people working on similar kinds of applications, space related or not.