Mission Analysis flight plans

Mission Analysis evaluates an ordered flight plan using a frozen spacecraft configuration. Open Trajectories, choose a plan or create one, and work through Assets → Initial orbit → Flight plan.

​

Add the maneuver requirements

​

SMA maintenance

Select Add SMA maintenance and provide:

• Nominal mean semi-major axis and its maintained plus/minus tolerance, in km.
• Maintenance duration in days, measured from the preceding phase’s actual end.
• A chemical or electric thruster belonging to the selected Mission Analysis spacecraft.
• Phase propellant cap, propellant reserve, and maximum available duty fraction.
• Sunlight-only eligibility and any UTC thrust blackouts that apply.

The band must hold throughout the maintained interval. The search can use coast, refill or powered/coast behavior and can choose an endpoint anywhere permitted by the band. It does not force a return to nominal SMA.

​

Inclination change

Select Add Inclination change and enter the target mean inclination and plus/minus tolerance in degrees, maximum elapsed duration, propulsion and resource limits. This is a pure plane-change objective: it does not deliberately change altitude to make the maneuver cheaper. Natural orbital perturbations still act. These study models initially cover near-circular LEO. The result identifies the method and its applicability. If a requirement, resource limit or numerical check cannot be satisfied, the result explains the unsuccessful computation instead of treating the unfinished plan as a cheaper solution.

​

Propellant across the whole plan

The objective is total propellant consumed by the complete ordered flight plan. An earlier phase may spend more when that saves greater consumption in a later phase using different propulsion. Every later phase inherits the achieved orbit, actual UTC epoch and remaining mass. Coast durations, phase order, selected thrusters, authored bands and explicit targets remain requirements. Reorder phases in the editor when you intend to change the mission; Disposal remains the final phase. Save stores the configuration. Save & run queues its evaluation. Editing is locked while the run is queued or running. Reopening restores the authored requirements, not the optimizer’s selected policies.

​

Read the result

Whole-plan propellant search shows the verified plan cost, a phase-local reference under the same mission requirements, savings, evaluation counts and the reason the search ended. Its phase table makes extra early spending and downstream savings visible. A verified feasible result is the best solution found by the recorded search—not proof of a global optimum. Open a phase to review its achieved mean orbit, maintained range, consumption, remaining propellant, required reserve, timing, method and assumptions. The requested configuration shown alongside evidence belongs to the run that produced it, even if the saved plan is subsequently edited. Mission budget aggregates recorded phase costs and remaining mass. Partial budgets identify unfinished phases; missing historical evidence is unavailable, not zero.