Concept of a generic test environment for advanced spacecraft systems

Advanced spacecraft systems have elevated requirements concerning time-critical operations, reliability, real-time behavior and determinism. Typical missions with highest requirements in these fields are On-Orbit Servicing (OOS) and space robotic applications. As the real-time behavior often strongly depends on the whole spacecraft system and data handling architecture, the Institute of Astronautics (LRT) is in process of developing a Generic Verification Environment for Real-Time Spacecraft Systems (VERTIS). It will act as a platform for spacecraft architecture research and will allow the rapid set-up and testing of different spacecraft architecture, data handling and redundancy concepts. This approach allows measurements and the performance of integrated system level tests of spacecraft architectures in a very early development phase to acquire profound data and to verify software models and simulation results. A focus of VERTIS will be the potential to perform closed-loop end-to-end tests of the complete communication chain. The test bed will enclose a SpaceWire test environment and interfaces for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) and environmental simulations. It will also offer up- and downlink capabilities to a geostationary relay satellite for the evaluation of link properties and latency effects on the tested system. This paper describes the conception, set-up and science potentials of the test and verification environment.