DevOps for Spacecraft Flight Software

Abstract

The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)mission, led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), will be the first ever space mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by a kinetic impactor. The DART flight software team recognizes that meeting this challenge, especially within cost and schedule constraints, requires enhancing software practices with a strong Development and Operations (DevOps)methodology. DevOps fuses software development and operations to form a tight feedback loop during software construction and release deployment. The team has established and implemented a DevOps architecture that has already benefited the DART mission, including successful integration testing with NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster-Commercial (NEXT-C)electric propulsion system. This DevOps architecture consists of several key components: a Software-In-The-Loop (SWIL)environment that acts as a spacecraft on a laptop, enabling a scalable automated test program, a Continuous Integration (CI)regiment that provides rapid feedback during the daily development workflow, and a Continuous Delivery (CD)practice that enables single click deployment of the latest flight software to DART's Hardware-In-The-Loop (HWIL)testbeds. DART is on target to achieve the goal of a successful, nightly, simulated asteroid impact. This paper will introduce the DART mission, discuss DevOps and the philosophy as it applies to spacecraft flight software development, illustrate DART's DevOps architecture and walk the audience through each major component, and finally, present a resulting case study: the successful NEXT-C test campaign.