Verification and Validation Tracking Automation on the SPHEREx Project

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch or Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) is a NASA Astrophysics Medium Class Explorer mission that was selected in 2019 to perform the first infrared all-sky spectral survey. The mission will fly a single, wide field of view telescope mounted on top of a Ball Configurable Platform (BCP) bus to take near infrared images of hundreds of millions of galaxies and other astronomical phenomena over its two-year mission. SPHEREx is currently in phase C and recently completed its Systems Integration Review (SIR) in November of 2023 with hardware currently being built and tested for assembly, integration, and test (AI&T) in 2024. The mission is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket out of Vandenberg, CA no earlier than February 2025.SPHEREx is a small, class C mission without the unique set of systems engineering personnel dedicated to verification and validation (V&V) tracking and execution that many larger, class A or B missions have. Maintaining accurate and insightful metrics despite unavoidable schedule changes requires time and resources the project lacks. These challenges motivated the Project Systems Engineering (PSE) team to investigate ways to streamline V&V tracking, leading to the development of a suite of automation tools that perform tasks and create visualizations and metrics that otherwise would have been done manually or not at all. This paper will discuss where and how the project has implemented automation as well as the impacts this has had on the ongoing Phase C work. The integration of these tools with commonly used software products (such as Microsoft Project and DOORS Next Generation) and how it allows the team to synchronize the project schedule with V&V activities and output useful information regarding current status and schedule dependencies will also be included.