NanoSat MO Framework: Drill down your nanosatellite’s platform using CCSDS mission operations services

Traditional European space missions exchange information with spacecraft using an old packet-based standard from 1994, in an era where mobile phones were the size of a brick and the internet was only just being born. Since then, many innovations appeared in the field of information and communications technologies that shaped the way one exchanges information on earth. The NanoSat MO Framework (NMF) intends to change the current view on on-board software by introducing “apps” in space that can be easily developed, debugged, tested, deployed and updated at any time. Furthermore, the same “app” can be used on different nanosatellite platforms. The NMF builds on top of the Mission Operations (MO) services architecture from the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), which allows the specification of services for mission operations of space assets. A new set of Platform services to interact with the platform devices have been defined, and they were specified in a platform-independent manner, that are generic enough to support devices that share the same functionality but have different low-level interfaces, for example, two GPS units from different vendors. This is achieved by having different backend adapters for the two different units while keeping the same GPS service frontend. OPS-SAT mission will allow worldwide experimenters to seamlessly develop their experiments in form of NMF apps by abstracting them from the low-level implementation details of the satellite platform. A lightweight software simulator mimicking OPS-SAT’s peripherals was implemented and plugged into the Platform services in order to allow any developer to directly test their app in a playground environment. This will give some degree of confidence before packaging it and sending it to the spacecraft. The simulator is part of the NMF Software Development Kit.