The Mars Pathfinder Attitude and Information Management System

The Mars Pathfinder Mission will develop a small, low cost/mass vehicle that demonstrates interplanetary cruise, entry, descent, and upright landing systems for use in future missions. The landing vehicle will carry a micro-rover to the surface of Mars. Imaging, atmospheric structure and meteorological experiments will be carried out using instruments aboard the lander. An elemental analysis experiment using an alpha, proton, x-ray spectrometer will be carried on the micro-rover. The mission will characterize surface morphology and geology, acquire elemental compositions of rocks and surface materials, obtain atmospheric measurements, such as pressure, temperature and accelerations, demonstrate utility and mobility of a small rover on the Martian surface and return engineering data on the condition and configuration of the lander after landing. It is currently planned for a Delta II launch in late 1996 for direct entry and descent to the surface in July, 1997. Rapidly advancing technical requirements and growing economic constraints on interplanetary spacecraft are driving spacecraft designers to rely more on small, lightweight commercially available equipment rather than equipment fashioned laboriously for one-of-a kind missions. Mars Pathfinder\u27s flight system design reflects this. Pathfinder draws heavily on advanced, low-cost technologies that are readily available in the commercial and defense space industries. This is true from electronics parts level to the assembly/subsystem level. The architecture integrates these technologies to produce a highly reliable system. The Mars Pathfinder Attitude and Information Management is built around a low cost, centralized system architecture built around a RAD hardened IBM RS 6000 computer for cruise to Mars, entry, descent and landing (EDL), and surface operations, capable of: providing for power, propulsion, telecommunication and attitude control during cruise to Mars; providing for sequencing, pyro firing, and telecommunications control during EDL; providing for power and telecommunications control for lander operations; processing engineering, rover and instrument data for transmission; support of rover surface operation; providing flight system fault management and same during cruise, EDL and lander surface operations; and operating in the cruise, EDL and Mars surface environments. In this paper an overview of the mission and flight system will be presented. In addition, the processes being developed by Pathfinder for NASA\u27s Discovery-class of missions to enable this faster, better, and cheaper implementation approach will be described. Finally, the details of the Mars Pathfinder Attitude and Information Management system will be described