Flight Software Technologies for the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway

Space Industries have always been facing new challenges as long as new oppor- tunities come up. One of these is to build a new space station called Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. This station will be in orbit around the Moon and consists of several modules that will be attached among them and, one of these, will be built by the European Space Agency along partner companies and its name will be International Habitation Module (I-HAB). The avionics, a portmanteau word derived from aviation and electronics, is a complex on-board system which includes communication, navigation, data handling and other hundred of functions and it is of paramount importance for a station. The thesis focuses on some technologies used in the I-HAB Avionics System. The research is devoted to demonstrate some of I-HAB on-board software autonomy capabilities. The isolation of possible ano- malies or faults and a system having a deterministic behaviour are critical for such systems. One of the possible choice we may do is to isolate the memory where soft- ware is resident and imposes real-time and resource sharing constraints. This is the so-called time and space partitioning and it will be shown by using some hardware platforms (used in space contexts) with an hypervisor and a real-time operating system. A NASA developed framework to design flight software is shown. Its name is Core Flight System, a framework born with the concept that emphasizes the soft- ware reuse. It relies on a layered architecture which lets software engineers focus on developing applications and not on Operating Systems and hardware platforms where they are supposed to run. After a brief analysis of this framework and its architecture, an application is shown specifically developed for the purpose to point out faults detection, isolation and recovery capabilities jointly used with NASA cFS applications (called reusable apps). The second part of this thesis focuses on reliable networks. In particular, the most fundamental concepts of Time Triggered Ether- net Protocol are illustrated. An implementation from TTTech, that is an Austrian company, has been taken into account. This protocol lets to design reliable and real-time networks. Some experiments in Laboratory have also conducted using de- velopment hardware available and the results are discussed. In the last part, some typical scenarios within the context of I-HAB Module and so, more in general, of the cis-lunar station are shown. These scenarios are designed within some breadboard configurations and exploit the mentioned above technologies. Finally, it is explai- ned the issues had for carrying out the research along lessons learned and possible future works.