Planetary Science Mission Architecture (PLASMA) Exploration Tool: Pilot Phase Study Report

Abstract

The identification of trajectories and promising mission architectures that enable planetary missions or significantly reduce their cost is a highly valuable asset for the planetary science and mission engineering community. The 2023-2032 Planetary Science Decadal Survey underscored the importance of programs to bridge opportunity gaps by increasing access to information about mission concept formulation, development, and proposals for future NASA missions. The high-level objective of this work is to create a proof-of-concept easy-to-use mission design suite aims to fill this gap, by providing the community with a new state-of-the-art mission design suite to enable rapid, early-stage end-to-end planning for NASA’s future planetary science missions. In this report, the work done in the pilot phase of Planetary Science Mission Architecture (PLASMA) Exploration Tool, its current capabilities, and technical details are discussed.