Planet Hunter - Exoplanet Exploration Program - NASA

PLANET HUNTER
Section 5. Activity Schedule
Planet Hunter is built upon the past Formulation Phase history for the SIM mission that began with Phase
A start in October 1997 and Phase B start in July 2003. All the technology work was completed by July
2005 and significant additional engineering risk reduction has occurred since then, as described above in
the technology section. Because of this precursor work, we have high confidence in the fidelity of the estimated
cost and schedule to go.
An independent cost estimate for Planet Hunter
was performed March 2009 by the Aerospace Corporation
[1]. At the same time, a JPL–institutional
cost estimate was developed by the JPL Engineering
Cost Estimating Office using multiple models.
Both used a very detailed version of the optimum
Planet Hunter schedule described below.
The optimum schedule for the development
of Planet Hunter assumes an October 2010 start,
launch in July 2015, 30-day post launch IOC (part
of Phase D), 120 day science calibration, 5 years
of operations, and one year of post operations final
data processing, archival, and project closeout.
Table 5-1 shows the significant project milestones,
their dates, and the years from the start of FY2011.
Schedule Validation
As part of the Aerospace ICE for the SIM Lite
mission [2], an Independent Schedule Estimate
(ISE) and a complexity based risk assessment (Co-
BRA) [3] were performed. This tool uses up to 40
parameters to describe the mission and computes
a complexity index relative to other missions in the
Aerospace CoBRA database. The SIM Lite complexity
index and schedule estimates were plotted
relative to ~110 other missions in the database (see
Figure 5-1).
The points in this plot are: Green-diamond =
successful; Yellow-X = impaired; Red-X = failed;
gray-diamond = yet to be determined.
Table 5-1. Schedule.
Event
Start development for launch
Mission-level PDR
Implementation Phase C/D start
Mission-level CDR
Observatory I&T (Phase D) start
Launch Readiness Date (LRD)
IOC complete; operations (Phase E) start
Science calibration complete
5-year science ops complete
Post-Ops activities complete (Phase F)
Date for a
July 2015 Launch
October 2010
October 2011
January 2012
October 2012
June 2014
July 2015
August 2015
December 2015
December 2020
December 2021
Years from
start of FY2011
0
1.0
1.3
2.0
3.7
4.7
4.8
5.3
10.2
11.2
16