Abstract
The standardization of the physical aspects of nanosatellites (also known as CubeSats) and their wide adoption in academia and industry has made the mass production and availability of off-the-shelf components possible. While this has led to a significant reduction in satellite development time, the fact remains that a considerable amount of mission development time and effort continues to be spent on flight software development. The CubeSat’s agile development environment makes it challenging to utilize the advantages of existing software frameworks. Such an adoption is not straightforward due to the added complexity characterized by a steep learning curve. A well-designed flight software architecture mitigates possible sources of failure and increases mission success rate while maintaining moderate complexity. This paper presents a novel approach to a flight software framework developed specifically for nanosatellites. The software framework is characterized by simplicity, reliability, modularity, portability, and real-time capability. The main features of the proposed framework include providing a standardized and explicit skeleton for each module to simplify their construction, offering standardized interfaces for all modules to simplify communication, and providing a collection of ready-to-use common services open for further enhancement by CubeSat software developers. The framework efficiency was demonstrated through a software developed for the MeznSat mission that was successfully launched into Low Earth Orbit in September 2020. The proposed software framework proved to simplify software development for the application developer while significantly enhancing software modularity.
Highlights
Nanosatellites are loosely defined as satellites with a total mass of less than 10 Kgs
Based on our previous experience developing software for CubeSats and our review of the literature, we have identified a set of requirements that we believe are necessary for a flight software framework that facilitates a shorter software development lifecycle especially within an agile, flexible, and time-constrained development environment
The work described in this paper identifies five quality attributes that an architect should adopt in building the flight software of a CubeSat
Summary
Nanosatellites are loosely defined as satellites with a total mass of less than 10 Kgs. The elements are static modules of some kind, such as classes, layers, or a division of functionality [2] Despite their varying complexity, implementation, and language of choice, the architectures were designed to follow very similar concepts encapsulating the software into a layered hierarchy with the core functionality divided into two: common functionalities and user-defined functionalities. The paper begins by outlining the characteristics of existing frameworks and defines the most desired attributes of a flight architecture based on literature and experience These attributes are described within the proposed architectural software design before their applications are demonstrated based on own experience in building MeznSat, a CubeSat for Greenhouse Gases Monitoring [7]
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