From Cocktail Napkin to Concept Feasibility: Spacecraft Design in Early Formulation with TATER

The Innovation Foundry at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is developing a new tool for rapid design, tradespace evaluation, and feasibility assessment of planetary science mission concepts in the earliest stages of formulation. The Tool for Architectural Tradespace Exploration and Refinement, or “TATER”, will encompass a broad set of analyses covering the driving factors needed to describe and compare concepts, from trajectories and technologies to cost and risk assessment and science value. At the core of TATER is a spacecraft design model suite, which allows a single user to design a self-consistent spacecraft with limited information. TATER estimates mass, power, and cost at the subsystem level, key design metrics that can be used to assess a concept's likelihood of meeting requirements. Thus, TATER provides users with a quantified basis for comparing design options early in the concept maturity timeline, so that the most promising options can be identified and selected for further development. Built on a framework of intertwined analyses, TATER incorporates both analytical relationships and empirical scaling models. The data sources behind the empirical models include historical actuals, proposals, and established rules-of-thumb. Originally constructed in Phoenix ModelCenter, TATER now utilizes the JPL Integrated Modeling Environment (IME), a web-based software architecture developed in-house for JPL's concurrent engineering teams. This paper describes the TATER data structure and analyses in detail, including the required inputs and expected outputs from the spacecraft design model. Additionally, the results of verification and validation activities are presented, comparing the output of TATER to that of higher-fidelity design models. These results have revealed some areas to be improved, but demonstrate that TATER is ready for pilot use in early formulation studies for preliminary feasibility checks.