Part of the Flight Plan during Apollo 15. Source: ww.history.nasa.gov

Each successful space mission has a successful Flight Plan team. The role of the flight plan team is very important, as it compiles all the information of the mission and places it in a master plan to allow the mission to flow smoothly. The goal of the flight plan team is to use all the limited resources in an efficient way, and maximize the scientific return. It needs to take into consideration all the details, all the possible redundancies, all the possible plan changes, and gives a follow up until the end of the post mission analysis.

Within the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF) the flight plan team is formed by 9 enthusiastic volunteers, including students as well as space professionals. Our work is to develop before the simulations the Mission Plan, which includes a rough schedule of all the activities. During the mission, we are in charge of planning strategies, the preparation of the field activity plan (FAP), work on a traverse plan (TP) and prepare daily activity packages (DAP). We are also in charge of following the executed plan in order to understand if there is need to change, update or modify the schedule for the next day. When the mission is over, we analyze the results and evaluate the scientific output of the experiments. We also need to understand if there were any delays and their causes, and if the scientific goals were meet.

MARS2013 Daily Activity Package compiled by the Flight Plan Team (c) OeWF (D. Foeger)

We would like to share that this year we have been working hard to consolidate our team, under the leadership of Nina Sejkora. To keep the workflow, we have been participating in monthly team teleconferences to share our progress, to be aware of new goals and assign action points that are followed by emails, check ups and deadlines.

Recently, we just finished the first version of the Flight Plan Team Handbook. This handbook will help us within our team, and act as a basic manual for proper Mission Planning, containing guidelines, definitions, workflows, procedures and lessons- learned.  We also had a long team teleconference were we did a “paper mission plan”. This was an exercise to understand the underlying workflows of the development of a mission plan, taking into account the amount of people involved, the requirements of the (dummy) experiments, the duration of the mission based on how many days we were going to simulate, and the best schedule for each of those days.

AMADEE-15 is one of our main activities now, as we need to fully contribute with the preparations of the entire simulation that will take place August 2015. As time passes by, we already contacted the Principal Investigators (PI) of all the proposed experiments to be conducted during AMADEE-15, and had a first teleconference with each of them, to get the basic and most important data on their experiments. This work is reflected in the Standard Experiment Information Forms (SEIF), which will be filled with the necessary basic information by the end of this and finished in February next year. So far, we have 12 proposed experiments to be conducted during AMADEE-15, including biological, psychological, robotic and geological experiments.

Extract of the Paper Mission Plan developed in November 2014

The flight plan leader and some of its members also participated in the recent OeWF workshop, either on-site or remotely. We are so excited of having new members joining the family of the Austrian Space Forum, and would be happy to welcome more members into the Flight Plan team.

Would you like to learn more about the Flight Plan of Apollo 15?
Click here: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11fltpln_final_reformat.pdf

– Carmen Felix