The Power of High-Fidelity, Mission-Level Modeling and Simulation to Influence Spacecraft Design and Operability for Europa Clipper

NASA’s planned Europa Clipper mission seeks to assess the habitability of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which exhibits strong evidence of an ocean of liquid water underneath its icy crust. The sheer number of unique instruments, all of which require quiescent environments in order to operate, compounded with Jupiter’s distance from the Sun and Earth, makes this planned mission challenging and resource-constrained. High-fidelity, mission-level simulations that model the spacecraft, ground, and environment from launch to end of mission with a given trajectory and mission plan have been employed early in the project life cycle to better understand the interactions between various components of the mission and how design changes impact the entire system. These simulations have already resulted in tangible benefits to the project by providing vital input to key spacecraft trades, assessing impacts to operability, and quantifying how well the scientific objectives of the mission can be achieved. Improvements to simulation performance and to the process by which information defining the system is gathered and built into models used by simulations have the potential to further expand the scope of their use on Europa Clipper and future missions.