Ground Software to Support Autonomous Onboard Scheduling for Mars Perseverance Rover

The flight software for the Mars Perseverance Rover is capable of autonomous onboard scheduling. The goal of this capability is to reduce spacecraft idle time and unnecessary heating to leave more resources for science observations. Enabling this first-of-its-kind onboard scheduling requires tight coordination between the Mission Operations team, ground software, and flight software. This paper will focus on the ground software tools that have been created or enhanced by the Mars 2020 mission in support of autonomous onboard scheduling. The following challenges were encountered: automating the creation of planning constraints to reduce tedious and error-prone manual work, while providing enough flexibility for the team to handle unique scenarios; providing visibility to allow the Operations team to build trust in a variable execution system in a way that is digestible within a tight planning timeline; using flight software simulation to validate the files that will be sent to the spacecraft in a realistic manner, even though we cannot truly predict what will happen on the rover; after plan execution on the rover, analyzing the data returned from the spacecraft to understand what did happen, and using that information to predict initial conditions for the next planning cycle.