Evolution of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover's Strategic Planning Process

The Perseverance rover has completed three scientific campaigns in Jezero crater, Mars, encompassing the following regions: 1) Crater Floor, 2) Fan Front, and 3) Upper Fan. During that time, the mission has collected 21 samples, traversed 21 km of distance, and deposited 10 samples at the Three Forks location near the base of the Fan Front. Perseverance’s progress has been enabled by efficiencies in the Mars 2020 operational processes at both the strategic and tactical levels. Strategic planning is an especially important process given Perseverance’s role in the Mars Sample Return campaign as the potential sample delivery mechanism to the Sample Return Lander in the future. In this work, we discuss the evolution of strategic planning on the Perseverance mission, and compare predicted, strategically-developed campaign plans with the actual executed mission. The strategic campaign planning process establishes a campaign’s science objectives and provides an estimate of its duration and sample collection count in advance of its execution. Sols are primarily allocated for sampling, driving, science, and engineering activities, with a proportion of sols held as margin to account for unexpected events or discoveries. Perseverance’s anticipated exploration of a campaign area is captured as a baseline sol path or campaign calendar that considers: orbiter schedules, solar conjunction, and Earth schedules such as holidays. This campaign plan is fed into the Campaign Implementation and Tactical processes, which produce activity plans that are uplinked as a complete sequence bundle at the end of each planning day. As tactical plans execute, a sol-by-sol record of the executed campaign is documented, enabling comparison to the initial campaign calendar. The above process has been used to plan each of Perseverance’s first three science campaigns. Following the completion of each campaign, assumptions and lessons learned from that campaign are fed forward into the planning of the subsequent campaign, such as updates to proportion of margin sols, updated mobility estimates, and new operational efficiencies and rover capabilities. In general, the proportion of campaign-advancing sols has increased with each campaign. The Mars 2020 mission has now accumulated a robust record over 900 sols of the strategically planned versus executed activities of the rover. Continued feedback from the strategic planning process will continue to improve the efficacy of predictive mission planning on Mars 2020, increasing our ability to allocate resources more accurately for future campaigns and ensuring that Perseverance fulfills the expectations of the evolving Mars Sample Return campaign. The data and lessons from Mars 2020’s strategic processes will also provide a template for strategic mission planning for future planetary missions.