Planetary Exploration Twin: Enceladus
The Planetary Exploration Twin (PET), a cutting-edge, data-driven software framework, will provide a unified, modular system that integrates science objectives, instrument design, resource management, and operational planning. This approach is applicable to any complex, data-intensive system requiring rigorous planning, optimization, and decision-making—such as terrestrial environmental monitoring, climate modeling, energy infrastructure planning, and autonomous systems development.
Our efforts will focus on the Saturnian moon Enceladus with a mindset to make the approach applicable to other bodies as well. The formulation of future planetary science missions would benefit from taking advantage of emerging modeling capabilities to quantify our ability to test key scientific hypotheses. These enhanced modeling efforts could include the ability to run scenario missions and allow one to test for data sufficiency.