Activity Planning for the Phoenix Mars Lander Mission

The Phoenix Mars Mission is the first mission in the NASA Scout Program. As a Scout Mission, Phoenix must be relatively low-cost and yet highly innovative. Likewise, the Ground Data System (GDS) is under similar constraints. Key to the GDS tool development has been the utilization of the Ensemble framework -an open architecture for the development, integration, and deployment of mission operations software. Ensemble has enabled the production of a low-cost, feature-rich tool to support tactical mission activity planning called The Phoenix Science Interface (PSI).