This is an interesting question. Here is how I will approach it.

Product clarity and context: 

NASA needs help building a software application for a rotorcraft, called Dragonfly, that will be sent to Saturn’s moon Titan to find traces of life. For clarity, I will ask NASA for a set of requirements such as listed below (note these are not exhaustive):

• Do they want a command and control setup or is this drone supposed to be fully autonomous?
• Are there any humans within a proxomity (saw an orbiting space craft) that would hace access to the drone?
• What are some of the specific rasks they expect the drone to do?
• What kind of data fidelity they want i.e. videos, images or text results etc?

Product constraints:

Given this is a large problem set, we really need to whittle this down to the bare essentials of what we need to build for this product. For the SW capabilities we will build, it is important to make some assumptions about the hardware suite that will be available to us. I will go ahead and lay down some assumptions.

• From the hardware sensor side we have access to:
  • high resolution video feed
  • image capturing camera
  • audio sensors
  • heat sensors
  • multi-spectrum sensors
  • gyroscopes and collison avoidance systems
  • positioning beacon etc
• From a HW argonomics standpoint we have access to:
  • An arm/device that can take samples and store them in a container
• From a power perspective:
  • Main charging will happen on some kind of a base station / lab that will land on the surface along with the drone
  • Dragonfly has self charging capabilities if it needs to recharge while on a mission

• NASA wants some command and control i.e. give instructions to drone to execute from earth
• They want videos, images and text data of experiments
• System and firmware updates are possible remotely
• We will focus on remote software features vs. onboard software that controls the flight/movement etc

Before we move on to use-cases, I will list down a range of personas who may be the user’s of this software.

1. Flight operators
2. Maintenance engineers
3. Research scientists

1. Inputs:
   1. A graphical interface with the a map interface to input coordinates for differnet target locations
   2. Create different waypoints for longer missions
   3. Identify hazards and no fly zones for the drone
2. Retrieval:
   1. Access historical flight records and display them
   2. Check all telemetry for the drone for actuals vs. expected
   3. Retrieve video, image and other sensor data for flight analysis

• Google should play to its strengths in Google Earth and Google Maps to design an interface that would map Titan (or a portion of Titan) assuming there were probes sent before Dragonfly to map the surface
• Users should be able to create missioin names, coordinates and way points to can be entered on the map. The tool should be able to provide battery spent rates for each mission and help the flight and researchers make decisions
• Due to limited battery for the light weight Dragonfly, each way point will have options available that will identify battery spent for executing each activity:
  • Video or image recon;
  • Sample collection;
  • Multi sensor recon i.e. infra/xray etc;

• Our software should have a section that allows the operator to look at all flight data to understand how the drone was managing its flight i.e. :
  • Get basic flight details like time of flight, altitude, azimuths etc
  • Did it encounter an object that it had to go around
  • Did the flight take longer than originally planned
  • Was the battery drain faster than expected
• The should have options for extracting and sharing this data with engineers for analysis