Automated Planning for Spacecraft and Mission Design

Mission design engineers identify a spacecraft design and mission plan that best achieves the mission objectives while staying within cost, mass, and operability constraints. It is often easiest to evaluate a spacecraft design in the context of a detailed mission plan. Generating plans by hand is labor-intensive. We present an AI planning system that automatically generates and evaluates mission plans for specified spacecraft designs. This system has been applied to design problems from a number of NASA missions.