Design of flight software for the KySat CubeSat bus

Hishmeh, S.F.; Doering, Tyler James; Lumpp, James E.

doi:10.1109/aero.2009.4839646

Cited by 10 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…To satisfy mission requirements, many CubeSat teams decide to develop custom flight software from the ground up (e.g. [7], [8] and [9]), without the use of software solutions like the Bright Ascension FSDK or those mentioned in this section. While discussing the impact of using Bright Ascension's FSDK on the development of EIRSAT-1's flight software in the following sections, the decision of these teams to develop software from the ground up is also considered.…”

Section: E Custommentioning

confidence: 99%

Flight Software Development for the EIRSAT-1 mission

Doyle¹,

Gloster²,

O’Toole³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Space Educational Activities

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The Educational Irish Research Satellite, known as EIRSAT-1, is a student-led project to design, build, test and launch Ireland's first satellite. The on-board software for this mission is being developed using Bright Ascension's GenerationOne Flight Software Development Kit. This paper provides an overview of this kit and of EIRSAT-1's on-board software design. Drawing on the team's contrasting experience with writing entirely custom firmware for the mission's science payloads, this work discusses the impact of using a kit on the software development process. The challenges associated with the educational nature of this project are the focus of this discussion. The objective of this paper is to provide useful information for other CubeSat teams assessing software development options.

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Section: E Custommentioning

confidence: 99%

Flight Software Development for the EIRSAT-1 mission

Doyle¹,

Gloster²,

O’Toole³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Space Educational Activities

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“…Most of the time the upper abstract layer is the result of architectural decisions to provide these quality characteristics, often considered as non-functional. Thus, the reviewed solutions can be grouped in: state machines [5]- [7], centralized architectures [8], [9], [11], [12], distributed architectures using messaging systems [10], [13]- [16], and formally verified architectures [17], [21]. Modularity is a common concern for flight software developers, but the definition of a module varies from one solution to another.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Modularity is a common concern for flight software developers, but the definition of a module varies from one solution to another. In Schmidt et al [8] and Hishmeh et al [9] modules are defined as a set of functionalities while in Manyak et al [11] are defined as tasks or threads. Flexibility or extensibility are also common goals in this context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Architecture-Tracking Approach to Evaluate a Modular and Extensible Flight Software for CubeSat Nanosatellites

et al. 2019

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Delivering better flight software is an important concern to improve CubeSat missions success. It has been identified as a key element to enhance team collaboration, increase reusability, reduce the mission risk, and facilitate the development and operation of new mission concepts, such as satellite megaconstellations. An appropriated fight software architecture represents the functional and non-functional requirements and guides the development. Therefore, to achieve the expected software quality, the architecture should be closely monitored during the entire software life cycle. However, ensuring that a flight software for a spacecraft embedded system closely follows the proposed architecture and addresses the set of non-functional requirements is a difficult and nontrivial problem. Motivated by requirements commonly described in previous CubeSat missions, in this work, we present the design and implementation of a flight software architecture based on the command design pattern. We also present an architecture tracking methodology to verify and control the flight software quality criteria during the development process through the use of graphical software analysis tools and agile programming techniques. This automatic software analysis tool was developed using Git, Jenkins, Moose, and Roassal, and has been applied in the SUCHAI series of nanosatellites to evaluate the impact of the architecture verification during the development history. The implemented flight software and the verification tools have been released as open source platforms and are available for the CubeSat community.

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“…However, 340 implementing redundancy at the software level is achievable and can solve some of the effects caused by SEU. Two possible types of software redundancy are envisaged and are listed as follows: a) Data redundancy: the authors of [31] state that critical data may be redundantly stored within a memory device to be able to recover from SEU effects. They applied this technique for the KySat-1 flight software, an educational CubeSat project by the Kentucky Space Consortium.…”

Section: Software Redundancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Design Guidelines for General-Purpose Payload-Oriented Nanosatellite Software Architectures

López

Marí

Balust

et al. 2018

Journal of Aerospace Information Systems

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Despite their limited lifespan and reduced cost, nano-satellite missions have proved to be suitable platforms for Earth observation, scientific experiments and technology demonstration. During the last years, the number of nanosatellite missions has noticeably increased, posing the need to improve several system characteristics to ultimately endorse the full potential of this class of spacecraft. In this context, this paper presents three design guidelines that can be applied in nano-satellite software in order to improve the system robustness, modularity and autonomy. The design guidelines presented in this paper, namely, hierarchy-enabled robustness, payload-oriented modularity, and on-board planning capabilities, are complemented with a structured review of complementary software techniques and architectural concepts that have been found in the literature. The paper justifies that these system-wide qualities are some of the most critical when designing flight software for CubeSat-like spacecraft and explores how they can improve mission performances and operability, enhance the system's tolerance to failures and ease the development cycles. Finally, this paper illustrates the application of the design guidelines by detailing the on-board software architecture for the 3 Cat-1, a CubeSat program carried out at the Nano-Satellite and Payload Laboratory of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC BarcelonaTech).

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Design of flight software for the KySat CubeSat bus

Cited by 10 publications

References 3 publications

Flight Software Development for the EIRSAT-1 mission

Flight Software Development for the EIRSAT-1 mission

An Architecture-Tracking Approach to Evaluate a Modular and Extensible Flight Software for CubeSat Nanosatellites

Design Guidelines for General-Purpose Payload-Oriented Nanosatellite Software Architectures

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