Productivity Challenges for Mars Rover Operations

Achieving consistently high levels of productivity for surface exploration missions has been a challenge for Mars missions. While the rovers have made major discoveries and accomplished a large number of objectives, they often require a great deal of effort from the operations teams and achievingobjectives can take longer than anticipated. This paper describes the early stages of a multi-year project to investigate solutions for enhancing surface mission productivity. A primary focus of this early stage is to conduct in-depth studies of Mars Science Laboratory science campaigns to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that impact productivity, and to use this understanding to identify potential changes to flight software and ground operations practices to increase productivity. We present the science campaigns we have selected along with a conceptual model of how surface missions achieve objectives that is used to guide the study. We also provide some early thoughts on the technologies, and their interactions, which we believe will play an important role in addressing surface mission productivity challenges.We are in the early stages of a multi-year project to studyand address productivity challenges of future surface missions. We have identified campaigns from the MSL missionfor study which we believe will yield valuable informationabout the nature of surface mission productivity challenges.Based on preliminary analysis from the data collected weanticipate that the lessons from these case studies will helpdevelop and mature our concepts for changes to flight andground systems to address these challenges.While the focus of our work is on Mars rover missions, webelieve the concepts in the work will be applicable to a variety of in-situ explorers, including Venus, and Titan, as wellas orbital missions, such as the Europa orbiter. These missions will also benefit from the ability to adapt and respondto the latest state of the spacecraft and its environment.