Over the last 11 years the language for mission planning (LMP) has grown from a small starting block through to an operational planning mechanism used by many ESA missions. Throughout this time it has evolved and matured from its initial ESA study to an operational and configurable functionality of many ESA missions controlled from ESOC. The LMP has been an integral part of operational planning systems in ESOC for the past seven years now, being developed further during ESA run studies and driven from operational needs and experiences. This evolution is still in full swing today with more recent and future missions taking it on board. These include such missions as Gaia, Rosetta and BepiColombo. All of these missions are providing new ideas and direction for the language as well as introducing additional concepts to those already existing, and more importantly gaining valuable experience with the capabilities of the language. In this paper we first provide an overview of the LMP with all of its intricacies, illustrating an evolution timeline from its birth to present day and outlining the Missions/Applications where it has already successfully been employed. We will provide details of the functionalities that were additionally required to extend the capabilities of the LMP for the operational concepts and show how these concepts have been re-used across missions for tasks with similar characteristics. We will elaborate, although briefly, on the concepts it has been designed to implement and how these have changed over the years, whilst giving a couple of concrete examples of the LMP in action taken from operational missions. Following on from this, the major evolutions of the language over its lifetime so far will be discussed with reference made to their origin and particular need. We then move on to discuss the relation of the LMP to the Mission Planning System Framework (MPSF) and how these two have been integrated together to form the Rosette/BepiColombo planning system. Finally we conclude the paper with a discussion on the foreseeable future of the LMP, identifying possible extensions and elaborating on the possibilities for future missions.
