A modern foundation for collaborative mission design

For years, mission analysis relied on a patchwork of legacy tools, which were often tailored to individual users or mission types. While powerful and flexible, these tools made collaboration difficult and were challenging to maintain.

“Everybody had their own tools, their own file formats, their own workflows,” Waldemar recalls. “It could be very difficult to hand over a project when a colleague left, because nothing was standardised.”

Now, with AMAT, uniform formats and shared interfaces make knowledge transfer between colleagues easier, ensuring that mission studies remain accessible long after completion. Code duplication is minimised and consistency is maintained, which is essential for missions that span decades, involve many teams and evolve significantly between early design and launch. After a trajectory has been designed, AMAT can seamlessly be used to perform the navigation analysis, which previously was not possible without an intermediate adjustment step, boosting efficiency.

AMAT also reinforces coherence between mission analysis and the wider Flight Dynamics activities. “AMAT builds on GODOT, a shared software infrastructure that underpins the division’s activities,” explains Senior Mission Analyst Ruaraidh Mackenzie, who led GODOT’s iterative development with his team.

Using the same underlying infrastructure for mission analysis and flight dynamics operations brings key advantages: trajectories and analyses developed with AMAT can be independently reproduced and validated by flight dynamics teams using operational tools built on the same foundation.