For over 25 years, Washington University (WashU) has received funding from NASA to build "The Analyst's Notebook," a multimedia knowledge discovery tool.
Initially developed in the mid-90s with funds from NASA’s Planetary Data System and later, the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) Spirit and Opportunity missions, the Analyst's Notebook has evolved into a comprehensive platform encompassing landed missions to Mars and Earth’s Moon. This tool has significantly improved documentation of the day-to-day operations and context for scientific data collected during planetary exploration.
While orbital missions typically follow a pre-defined plan of operations, landed missions like rovers on Mars present unique challenges. During pre-mission MER field tests in the Mojave Desert, scientists struggled to track decisions when isolated from the rover, necessitating meticulous documentation to ensure coordination and understanding. This led to the creation of the Analyst's Notebook to provide context for decisions made during missions.
The Analyst's Notebook was conceived to fill a critical gap in planetary science—the absence of a centralized approach to connecting archive data, daily team reports, and related materials in a way that reveals insights into the motivations and contexts behind data collected during space missions. Before its development, scientists lacked a comprehensive system to easily review the daily activities and decisions of a mission. And for scientists outside the mission, many of the materials were not available at all. Recognizing this challenge, the WashU team developed an online platform to codify and centralize this invaluable information. Tom Stein, Geosciences Node Associate Director, has been the project's lead since its beginning.
"With a landed mission, you don't have much understanding of what you're going to do three weeks from now based on where you are today," said Stein. "You have some ideas, but as you drive along, you make discoveries, and there are opportunities for science that can pop up because you went around a corner or over a hill and found something new, or learned something that makes you want to stop and investigate."
Since its inception, the Analyst's Notebook has expanded to support numerous NASA missions, including all the Mars Rover missions, and more recent endeavors like the Mars seismometer mission, InSight. The concept was retrofitted to include data from the Apollo Missions. It now supports thirteen NASA missions, continuously evolving to meet new challenges and advance future scientific exploration.
Staff Scientist Ethan Schaefer has been diligently refining his coding skills necessary to work on the Analyst's Notebook. Both Stein and Schaefer are affiliated with the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at WashU. Schaefer brings with him immense enthusiasm and a deep passion for planetary science. "It's quite intimidating to jump into 25 years of code development," he admits. Nevertheless, he is eager to contribute, particularly focusing on adapting the Analyst's Notebook for the upcoming Dragonfly mission. Stein serves as the Principal Investigator on the contract for updating the Analyst's Notebook to support Dragonfly's mission operations.
Set to launch in 2028, the Dragonfly mission aims to study the prebiotic chemistry and potential habitability of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Unlike previous landed spacecraft, Dragonfly is a nuclear-powered rotorcraft that will fly across the Titan terrain. The rotorcraft has eight rotors and flies like a large drone, introducing several new operational challenges. One such challenge is accounting for the lander’s position as it traverses Titan’s dunes due to the lack of a global positioning system or high-resolution surface maps. Additionally, the mission must deal with Titan’s unique time measurements. Titan days, or "sols," are 15.9 Earth days long, necessitating intricate division of time for tracking detailed mission documentation.
Schaefer's task involves incorporating these unique aspects into the Analyst's Notebook, ensuring every piece of data collected is accessible and understandable. Dragonfly is the first mission to use the Analyst's Notebook as one of the team operational tools.
The Analyst's Notebook provides unique benefits in several ways. Chronologically, it allows a user to discover all the observations made on a single day, or the day after that, or the day before that. In NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) archive, data from those observations are curated in different places, because each comes from a different instrument. Spatially, the Notebook’s map interface (similar to Google Street View) enables geographic exploration of observations in a way not found in the archive. This interface allows scientists to determine what other measurements were taken at the same location or nearby, or to find other images of a specific science target. As a result of collaboration with mission science teams, the Analyst’s Notebook contains supplementary information that is not captured elsewhere.
For instance, if a scientist is interested in a specific rock on Mars, they can use the Notebook to find all vantage points and associated measurements of that rock. This powerful capability eliminates the need for scientists to painstakingly piece together this information from disparate sources.
The Notebook is updated when missions release new data to the NASA archive and is available to everyone at no cost. In addition, a team version serves some missions, like the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover, as an additional resource and is updated daily with newly acquired data and mission reports. For Dragonfly, this means that decisions on where the rotorcraft will fly or what measurements it will take next will be supported by this comprehensive documentation tool.
Stein and Schaefer are also involved in archiving mission data with NASA’s Planetary Data System Geosciences Node at WashU, ensuring data longevity and accessibility. These archives serve as a bedrock for future scientific endeavors, preserving critical data for the next 25, 50, or even 100 years. Part of this effort involves setting data standards that ensure long-term usability and interoperability, an effort in which Schaefer is actively involved through a PDS standards committee, the Data Design Working Group.
Schaefer’s enthusiasm for this project is rooted in personal history. His passion for planetary science was kindled by the Cassini-Huygens mission launched in 1997, specifically Huygens’ brief foray on Titan's surface in 2005. Now, he finds himself working on the next landmark mission to Titan, bringing his journey full circle.
For scientists, enthusiasts, or anyone interested in space exploration, the Analyst's Notebook offers a rich, interactive window into the daily operations and monumental discoveries of NASA's missions, both past and future.
