Product Verification on Mars Express – Routine Validation to Ensure Routine Success

Modern space missions have increasingly complex operations, both on-board and on ground. Mars Express is no exception to this rule, with frequent special science operations and a bespoke plan for each individual orbit. While well validated and competent planning systems are the basis on which such operations are built, a routine system of validating the output of such systems is an important component to ensuring safe and successful operations. In this sense we never stop validating on Mars Express and by doing this we are able to ensure a high level of success and minimize and catch errors long before they reach the spacecraft or the ground station. In order to be able to do this for complex and varied operations we employ a multi-layered approach featuring both manual and automatic checks. This paper will describe what these different levels of checking entail and how the decisions have been made on whether or not to automate. This is a dynamic process with automation being consistently introduced when it can provide more efficient and cost-effective than manual checking. One of the major new introductions on Mars Express is a highly configurable state machine engine that is flexible enough to perform a wide number of checks that traditionally hav