The computer assisted environment for space mission planning and evaluation

With the characteristics of technology-density, system-complexity, and high cost and risk, to organize and run a space mission is extremely complex system engineering. The commanders must pre-planning and do some coordination arrangements detailedly and repeatedly, but still the space mission often is completed with high cost and risks. In order to solve these problems, the author does some research on the automated commanding tool, which is based on computer simulation and can be used to assist the commanders. The software in this paper includes three components: programming module, demonstration module and evaluation module, which support the automatic and semi-automatic option, situation judgment, program development and resource allocation. All the three components share the data and information which stored in database. Supported by the software commanders can enhance the efficiency and accuracy in drawing up a mission plan, and reduce the costs and risks. In this paper the contents of the space mission planning are analyzed firstly, and then the software's design and implementation under a distributed environment are described in detail, from three aspects as the system components, logical structure and operation process, and finally a prototype system is built as a preliminary verification of the software functions.