Thermal is the Plan, the Plan is Death: Deployment of the Mars2020 On-Board Planner

As the Mars 2020 rover mission has transitioned into use of an autonomous scheduling and execution framework known as “On-Board Planner” in October 2023, only one domain of its functionality has continued to produce complexity and churn in the flight and ground implementation. This parallel thread of thermal control for Mars2020’s actuators and instruments services a variety of use patterns in operations that must all be accommodated without substantially delaying or dropping activities, in support of On-Board Planner’s foundational objective to augment mission throughput by reducing energy use and increasing available time. If OBP stumbles, it’s fair to predict that the root cause will likely be related to thermal control. This paper discusses some of the design history and underlying reasoning for changes made since prior reporting, some of the fact patterns that breed different strategies for provisioning thermal configuration and what those strategies are, and flight data analysis of early flight operations.