Increasing flight software reuse with OpenSatKit

In January 2015 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) released the core Flight System (cFS) as open source under the NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA) license. The cFS is based on flight software (FSW) developed for 12 spacecraft spanning nearly two decades of effort. The cFS can provide about a third of the FSW functionality for a low-earth orbiting scientific spacecraft. The cFS is a FSW framework that is portable, configurable, and extendable using a product line deployment model. However, the components are maintained separately so the user must configure, integrate, and deploy them as a cohesive functional system. This can be very challenging, especially for organizations with minimal FSW development experience, such as universities, that are building CubeSats. This paper describes the OpenSatKit^[2] that was developed to address the cFS deployment challenges and to serve as a cFS training platform for new users. OpenSatKit provides a fully functional out-of-the box software system that includes NASA's cFS, Ball Aerospace's command and control system COSMOS, and a NASA dynamic simulator called 42. The kit is freely available, since all of the components have been released as open source. The kit runs on a Linux platform. It includes eight cFS applications, several kit-specific applications, and built in demos that illustrate how to use key application features. It also includes the software necessary to port the cFS to a Raspberry Pi and instructions for configuring COSMOS to communicate with the target. All of the demos and test scripts can be rerun unchanged with the cFS running on the Raspberry Pi. OpenSatKit can serve two significant architectural roles that will further help the adoption of the cFS and help create a community of users that can share assets. First, the kit is being enhanced to automate the integration of applications with the goal of creating a virtual cFS `App Store'. Second, a platform certification test suite can be developed that would allow users to verify the port of the cFS to a new platform. This paper will describe the current state of these efforts and plans for the future.