A Mission Concept Review (MCR) aims to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed mission concept as well as its ability to fulfill the needs and objectives of the program. It is intended to determine whether the maturity of the concept and the associated planning are sufficient for the concept and development phase to begin. A panel of inspireFly team leaders will discuss if the project addresses critical needs, and if the proposed mission concepts are feasible.
The document should detail the following within 15-20 pages using the standard inspireFly proposal format.
1. Mission Statement
A good mission statement should answer four questions: “what is the goal of your mission?”, “what data will you gather?”, “how will this be done?”, and “how will the collected data contribute to our scientific knowledge of the planets/solar system?”. It should not be longer than a paragraph or two. This is just to give the reviewer a general idea of your concept and introduce the mission type being designed (think of this as an abstract).
2. Background
Discuss all relevant background and research done.
3. Problem Definition
Discuss the 12 products of Problem Definition here, this is an example of how your section can be split up as well as how sub sections should be formatted. Look at sample papers to see how your Problem Definition section should look.
3.1 Scope
3.2 Stakeholders
3.3 Needs Alterables Constraints
3.4 Partitioning of the Problem
4. Mission Requirements
Describe any requirements and constraints outlined in the mission task document and add your team’s top-level science objectives. After MCR, your team should derive child requirements from these top-level parent requirements to have requirements for all major subsystems (mechanical, thermal, payload, electrical, etc.).
5. Mission Success Criteria
This section should define the criteria your project must meet to be deemed “successful”. These criteria should be derived from the mission requirements and be quantifiable - this ensures that the word “success” is truly defined. There should be a clear difference between the mission’s minimum success and its optimal success. Optimal success and a requirement are usually synonymous, but a minimum success criterion could be a lower level of success. For example, a requirement could be “shall collect a core sample from a depth of 1 meter,” which may also be the optimal goal, but the minimum success could be only drilling to a depth of 10cm.
6. Environmental Hazards and Considerations
At this stage, your team should start to identify the hazards present to your mission in the environment it is going to. These hazards can range from geologic hazards (EX: terrain and how it could affect mobility), atmospheric hazards (EX: high winds), radiation (EX: some planets have a very thin to non-existent upper atmosphere that provides little to no protection from solar/space radiation), etc… This list should be comprehensive, detailed, and contain the hazards, how the team identifies they might negatively impact the mission, and the ways in which the team could mitigate these hazards through the design. This will be used to help develop some of your risks later.
7. Programmatics
7.1 Team Organization
How will the team handle delegation of the workload, team organization, and decision making (for various situations). Is the team equipped to handle the project, and if not, what will they do to change that? Discuss the roles held by each member and the time they can commit to achieving the future work. Also, how will the team handle differences in opinion/ideas?
7.2 Schedule Estimate
What is the rough schedule estimate for the next semester? Does it fall within an acceptable range? As a reminder, keep in mind spring break and finals time as well as future deliverables.
8. System Evaluation Criteria
Identify the primary criteria the team will use in evaluating the different options for the vehicle systems. These criteria will be driven by the mission and what is needed to help achieve the objectives. Look at Value System Design slides and explain the hierarchy of these criteria and why they were selected. Initial weights of these criteria would be beneficial.
9. Alternative Mission Concepts
What other mission concepts did the team brainstorm and consider prior to this selected concept? Why were they not chosen? How was this decision made? For example, what options were considered related to; measurables, location, vehicle.
10. Conclusion
This section should summarize the MCR. This section should also discuss future plans: what are the next milestones the team is working towards? If you had more time, what would you continue working on? Include your team’s plans for the System Requirements Review (SRR). This should be no more than 1-2 paragraphs.