“In OBP We Trust”: Verification and Validation of the M2020 On Board Planner Flight Software

With a planned deployment to the Perseverance roverin October 2023, the Mars 2020 On Board Planner (OBP) flightsoftware (FSW) will allow the rover to conserve energy and au-tonomously perform more activities when surplus resources (i.e.energy, data volume, time) are available. This functionality iscritical to support efficient resource management and maximizethe productivity of the vehicle as the rover’s battery degradesover time, particularly as the Mars Sample Return mission(MSR) may rely on Perseverance to facilitate sample deliveryto the return lander. Up until OBP’s deployment, operatorshave used the Master/Sub-Master paradigm (M/SM) for allMars missions to-date, in which rigid plans are uplinked to therover based on highly conservative models of activity resourceconsumption and duration that can unnecessarily constrain on-board plans. Thus, OBP must be robust enough to merit thetrust of mission science and operations personnel and preservethe health and safety of the spacecraft. To this end, we havecompleted a thorough verification and validation (V&V) cam-paign of the first iteration of OBP that will be deployed to therover as part of new Simple Planner (SP) operations paradigm.The campaign heavily relied on software testing to ensure thatcore flight software capabilities were met and that the softwarecomprehensively covered potential edge cases. In this paper,we motivate the need for a thorough V&V campaign going intothe deployment of On Board Planner to the Perseverance rover,contextualize how OBP integrates with the rest of the vehicle’sflight software, and leverage three case studies to evidence howtesting provided critical support towards the successful infusionof onboard scheduling software on the rover.