NanoSat MO framework: When OBSW turns into apps

The rising market of smartphones and tablets brought new ideas into software by providing quick development of software using well defined libraries from Android and iOS. Additionally, Android gave the community an extra degree of freedom by making their mobile apps, portable entities of software where the same app can run on the hardware of different vendors as long as the devices have the same underlying Android framework. Comparatively, the NanoSat MO Framework (NMF) based on CCSDS Mission Operations (MO) services intends to change the current view on On-Board Software (OBSW) by turning it into flexible “apps” that can be easily developed, debugged, tested, deployed and updated at any time without causing any major problem to the spacecraft. Furthermore, it will be possible to use the same “app” on different nanosatellite platforms as long as the NMF components are used. This means that an app developed using NMF's Software Development Kit (SDK) will be able to, for example, publish telemetry, receive telecommands or acquire the latest GPS position on different nanosatellites without any change in the code. It shall be used for the first time in the context of the ESA OPS-SAT mission in order to allow its experimenters to seamlessly develop their experiments in form of a NMF app without the need of understanding the low-level implementation details of the satellite platform. Software management is a key element that should not be underestimated on a framework intended run multiple apps. Installing, uninstalling, updating packages and starting, stopping, killing apps can define the behavior of the spacecraft and thus the NMF encompasses well-defined interfaces for software management. A new mind-set is introduced in this paper and a different approach compared to today's OBSW monolithic view is presented, making the following question arise: “How will space software look like in 20 years from now?”.