Early Formulation Model-centric Engineering on Nasa's Europa Mission Concept Study

By leveraging the existing Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) infrastructure at JPL and adding a modest investment, the Europa Mission Concept Study made striking advances in mission concept capture and analysis. This effort has reaffirmed the importance of architecting and successfully harnessed the synergistic relationship of system modeling to mission architecting. It clearly demonstrated that MBSE can provide greater agility than traditional systems engineering methods. This paper will describe the successful application of MBSE in the dynamic environment of early mission formulation, the significant results produced and lessons learned in the process.