Speaker
Mr
Holm Matthias
(Terma GmbH)
Description
Activity: Laboratory
TO: Felice Torelli/Software Systems Division
In the recent years, space industries in Europe and the Agency have worked together to raise the level of standardisation of the interfaces and building blocks of the spacecraft avionics. The most prominent initiatives in this context are the SAVOIR advisory group and its focus working groups such as SAVOIR-FAIRE covering the flight software domain.
The standardisation of building blocks and interfaces follows several complementary paths, one of these is definition of generic functional specification for the reusable elements of the avionics. These generic specifications are meant to become an input to the procurement process for new equipment with the purpose of having the same requirements for the same required functionality and defining consistently the components of a larger system architecture.
One of the first candidates to become an official generic functional specification is the “Flight Computer Initialisation Sequence - ESA Requirements” document [TEC-SWS/10-373/FT] describing the basic functionality required by the initialisation sequence (i.e. boot software) of any on-board computer.
Following a review at ESA and with industry, the specification has been used in this activity to implement the boot software of the AT697E processor board used as core of the Avionics Test Bench (ATB) On-Board Computer (OBC).
The output of this development activity is a reference implementation of the initialisation sequence building block and provided valuable lessons learned to be injected in the next update of the generic specification.
This activity is complemented by the development of the infrastructure to support remote access to the ATB located in the Avionics Lab.
The remote access infrastructure will ease the access to the ATB by industrial partners and will better exploit the simulation infrastructure.
Accessing the ATB from remote also allows to explore furthermore operational scenarios where the space segment functions are only accessible by the Monitor and Control System.
The presentation will provide with an overview of the project, of Initialisation Sequence design as well as of the Remote Access features and will highlight the lessons learned during the course of the activity.
