Multi-Project Telemetry-based Digital Twin Environment for Space-Mission Development, Analysis, and Operations

Real-time telemetry-based, 3D situational-awareness visualizations for deep space and earth-orbiting missions have proven to be vital during all mission phases from project formulation, mission development, design, verification, through post-launch operations. These visualizations play key roles in sending flight system health and status to engineers and communicating mission goals to stakeholders and the public. This real-time telemetry-based visualization technology has been used for many previous NASA/JPL missions including Mars 2020, Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD), NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), Galileo, and many NASA/JPL robotic systems research and development projects. Despite the number of missions that use these visualizations to carry out mission operations, there currently exists no multi-project environment. The current development model of building new and unique telemetry visualization software systems for each new mission is extremely cost-ineffective. In this paper, we, from JPL's Mission Control Systems Section, introduce Theia, our multi-project space mission telemetry-based visualization system which we offer as a low-cost, easily configurable, multi-project system inspired by our recent work on the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) sequence for the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission. The Theia telemetry visualization system is an end-to-end solution that listens to a real-time telemetry or simulation data source, processes, packages, and streams that data through secure WebSockets to multiple simultaneously connected web browser clients executing our TheiaJS 3D visualization engine. TheiaJS presents the data to the user through an interactive 3D interface, extendable as required by individual missions. We describe Theia's complete system design and architecture, the construction and rendering of a flight-system Digital Twin, and the data pipeline needed to accurately and continuously update the Digital Twin and its environment. We illustrate Theia's use using historical data from two previous missions: Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and Mars Perseverance Rover 2020, as well as data from future missions such as NISAR and Psyche. In addition, we discuss challenges, system verification, validation, and integration with predictive models and analysis tools. We further explore Theia as the core of a fully integrated real-time flight mission analysis and visualization environment.