Software Product Assurance for Autonomy On-board Spacecraft

The increase of autonomy is an important trend in space systems, taking advantage of the increase of the on-board processing power to enable new or more efficient complex missions. This is particularly useful when the ground cannot react in real-time due to the communication delays, non-visibility periods, complexity or variability of the context. This raises new challenges for mission reliability and safety, due to both the criticality of the autonomous on-board software components, and to their complexity and the context variability. The former leads to strong software dependability and safety requirements, while the latter makes more difficult to fulfil such requirements. These peculiarities imply especially adequate software product assurance methodology and software dependability techniques.