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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.

Since 2003, the NASA Ames Research Center has been actively involved in researching and advancing the state-of-the-art of planning and scheduling tools for NASA mission operations. Our planning toolkit SPIFe (Scheduling and Planning Interface for Exploration) has supported a variety of missions and field tests, scheduling activities for Mars rovers as well as crew on-board International Space Station and NASA earth analogs. The scheduled plan is the integration of all the activities for the day/s. In turn, the agents (rovers, landers, spaceships, crew) execute from this schedule while the mission support team members (e.g., flight controllers) follow the schedule during execution. Over the last couple of years, our team has begun to research and validate methods that will better support users during realtime operations and execution of scheduled activities. Our team utilizes human-computer interaction principles to research user needs, identify workflow processes, prototype software aids, and user test these. This paper discusses three specific prototypes developed and user tested to support real-time operations: Score Mobile, Playbook, and Mobile Assistant for Task Execution (MATE).

In this work we discuss how the quality of localization knowledge impacts the remote operation of rovers on the surface of Mars. We look at the techniques of localization estimation used in the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover missions. We discuss the virtues and shortcomings of existing approaches and new improvements in the latest operations tools used to support the Mars Exploration Rover missions and rover technology development tasks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We conclude with future directions we plan to explore in improving the localization knowledge available for operations and more effective targeting of rovers and their instrument payloads.

This paper describes the role of human-computer interaction (HCI) design in the development and deployment of mission systems. We make the argument that more broad application of HCI methods and practice will be necessary to complete the ambitious objectives of future missions. In particular, the introduction of increased autonomy, reduction of ops personnel, increasingly tactical nature of surface operations, and more distributed mission ground operations present unique challenges that must be met with sound HCI-driven solutions. We describe a case study from where solid underlying technology was hindered by lack of attention to HCI issues, and describe how this is being remedied moving forward. Future missions will require planning processes to be much more efficient (orders of magnitude) than what was achieved for the Mars Exploration Rovers mission (2003). The case study focuses on the critical shift from the MAPGEN software used for tactical activity planning on MER to SPIFe, now base-lined for the Phoenix 2007 and MSL 2009 missions. MAPGEN added automated planning functionality (Europa) to the APGEN manual planning tool. SPIFe provides a next generation interface designed specifically to take advantage of an automated planner. The design of SPIFe is based on hundreds of hours of observation and operations experience on MER. This paper examines how key HCI lessons learned are being fed forward into this new set of planning tools, SPIFe and Europa 2.