Development of Flight Software for Small Explorer Spacecraft

A report describes a continuing program of development of flight software for the attitude-control system (ACS) and the command-and-data-handling (C&DH) system of a prototype standard spacecraft of the Small Explorer (SMEX)-Lite class. Both the C&DH and ACS parts of the software are designed to run on a single reduced-instruction-set computer (RISC) with a peripheral component interface (PCI) bus architecture. The software consists of VxWorks tasks written in C++. Various components of the software have either been developed anew or redesigned from heritage code written for prior spacecraft missions.

This work was done by Stephan R. Hammers of the Hammers Co. for Goddard Space Flight Center. GSC-14214