ESA research aims to integrate multiple projects on missions

The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (Lero) and ESA have signed a contract worth €300,000 (£265,000) for an 18-month research programme beginning in September 2011, which will also aim to achieve a greater level of overall autonomy for future missions.

Modern space-research missions are critically dependent on numerous complex software subsystems for their success. These include flight-control software, software tailored for each specific scientific experiment carried aboard and the operating system software that manages everything.

Failure in one component could jeopardise the correct behaviour of the rest and so a major research effort goes into the verification of their functioning.

Speaking to The Engineer, Mike Hinchey, Lero’s director (and former director of software engineering at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), said cost cutting will increasingly see multiple projects bundled on a single spacecraft.

‘One launch is very expensive, so if you can send five things together it’s an awful lot better,’ he said.

‘But the concern is you don’t have data interfering with one another; you don’t have one device picking up the wrong data from another device, so we’re working on proving that the system will segregate the different projects that are flying.’