The Mars Science Laboratory Supratactical Process

Abstract

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity landed on Mars on August 5th, 2012. In the past year of surface operations, MSL has accomplished complex post-landing subsystem checkouts of all of its subsystems and achieved many of its primary mission goals. While much of MSL’s operations process is based on Mars Exploration Rover (MER) operations, the Supratactical process is new to MSL. Like MER, the MSL rover is commanded every sol (Martian day) through a ‘tactical’ planning process, with the plan for a sol dependent on evaluation of the results from the prior sol. However, unlike MER, many MSL activities require coordinated multi-sol campaigns involving engineering and science instrument teams distributed around the world. The MSL Supratactical process was thus developed to coordinate strategic inputs to tactical planning and assess upcoming rover activities in light of the latest rover conditions. The Supratactical process provides a way to manage complexity and discover issues early, decreasing the chance that the tactical process will get overloaded and therefore have to reject activities, or that any threats to the rover ever reach the vehicle. The Supratactical process helps mitigate risks and identify opportunities in the upcoming rover activity plans by coordinating science and engineering priorities and constraints prior to the tactical process. As a result, it facilitates more optimal planning of rover activities during multi-sol campaigns. With a rover and payload significantly more complex than that of MER, and many operational constraints, the Supratactical process enables MSL to implement complicated plans on a MER-style tactical timeline. The Supratactical process has evolved to meet changing needs during the first year of MSL surface operations. Many of the lessons learned while applying the process during the early MSL checkout phase have enabled more efficient operations during the first sampling campaigns. That experience is now informing new changes to the process, as it is adapted during the long drive campaign to Mount Sharp. In all of the different phases of MSL surface operations to date, the Supratactical process has contributed to the rich science return of the mission by helping optimize rover plans and working constraints early. Future planetary surface missions of MSL-level complexity, which require both tactical planning as well as coordinated multi-sol campaigns, may benefit from a similar Supratactical process to enhance their mission return.