AMAT: charting ESAs path through the Solar System
Every space mission starts with a question: how do we get there? At ESA, Advanced Mission Analysis Tools (AMAT) is helping mission analysts answer it, providing a modern, flexible environment for designing complex trajectories from Earth orbit to deep space.
Long before a spacecraft lifts off the launch pad, its journey is carefully mapped, with planetary flybys and orbital manoeuvres tested and refined years in advance. At the heart of this early planning sits mission analysis – and at ESA, a new generation of software is now shaping how that work is done.
Developed at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, Advanced Mission Analysis Tools (AMAT) is a modern software environment designed to help mission analysts turn scientific ambition into viable spaceflight trajectories.
AMAT plays a critical role in enabling ESA to enhance flexibility and team collaboration while designing ambitious missions near our home planet, the moon or anywhere across the Solar System.
AMAT was developed through a combination of in‑house expertise and industrial support from Telespazio and GMV, with contributions from IMS and Indra Space. The software is available under the ESA Community Licence as part of the MIDAS package, allowing universities and industrial partners to benefit from this mission analysis infrastructure and strengthening Europe's wider space engineering ecosystem.
Mission analysis is a core activity within ESA's Flight Dynamics division focused on early mission design, often years before launch.
"Mission analysis is typically not involved in the operations themselves," explains Florian Renk, ESA's Flight Dynamics Division Head. "It starts long before the launch, when missions are still just ideas – sometimes with missions that don't get past the study phase."
Even if some early-phase studies never fly, these studies are essential. "The scientists say: we need to observe this region of the sky, fly past this moon, or through these plumes – so find a trajectory that achieves this," says Waldemar Martens, Mission Analyst at ESOC and AMAT Project Manager. "To efficiently find a path for the spacecraft through the Solar System, we need dedicated software. That's why we need AMAT."
But AMAT goes beyond interplanetary missions. Waldemar adds: "We support everything from constellations and lunar trajectories to operations in complex multi-body environments such as libration points."
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.
AMAT provides a unified environment for designing and analysing spacecraft trajectories across a wide range of mission types. Different missions demand different mathematical techniques, and AMAT brings these together in a consistent framework.
"For a Saturn mission, for example, you would never go directly from Earth to Saturn," Waldemar explains. "You would use multiple flybys – like Rosetta or Juice – and the techniques needed to design those trajectories are very specific. AMAT provides a modern software implementation of those algorithms that we use in our daily work."
"One of its main strengths is modularity," explains Mission Analyst Olga Ramirez Torralba. Olga was involved in the project from its inception as one of the main early-stage software developers and continues to use it daily as a mission analyst. "Users can build end-to-end mission scenarios by chaining together different phases or segments, and each segment can be easily replaced with simpler or more complex models depending on the analysis needs."
"This also promotes reuse," she explains. "For example, an Earth escape phase developed for an interplanetary mission such as Juice can be adapted for similar missions."
AMAT primarily produces numerical data and also generates technical trajectory plots and diagrams used throughout mission studies. The software supports a range of mission studies and confirmed projects, including Vigil, Argonaut, LISA, Plato, Ariel and the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission.
Beyond supporting critical algorithms, AMAT is built to evolve with future mission requirements and changing teams. "Since no single tool can cover all custom or edge-case design scenarios, it was important that users could integrate their own models and algorithms within the AMAT framework," says Olga. "Flexibility is a key strength of the tool."
"Mission analysts are encouraged to contribute their own scripts and algorithms to the shared repository, meaning the tool continuously evolves based on real analysis needs," Olga adds.
The software represents a shift from individual, mission‑specific tools to a shared, sustainable software platform. By providing unified interfaces across different mission types, AMAT improves efficiency, simplifies maintainability and makes it easier to onboard new users. It also strengthens ESA's ability to drive innovation by defining and developing state-of-the-art mission analysis capabilities.
Beyond ESA, AMAT is helping to streamline collaboration across Europe's space sector. Common data formats and shared methodologies simplify the exchange of information with industry partners during study and project-definition phases, supporting more efficient cooperation from the earliest stages of mission development.
Ruaraidh sums up the importance of this coherency: "When everyone is working with the same tools, good ideas can be shared more easily."
Tools like AMAT are essential to making ESA's missions possible. Every mission starts as an idea – and AMAT helps turn those ideas into viable, collaboratively designed journeys across the Solar System.
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