Can you tell us some war stories about the software your group wrote for the satellite?

Stacks? Testing? Firmware Updates? Programming languages?

Thank you!

First - they never want to use someone else software framework again (an early SW architect decided that would accelerate things but we ended up re-writing almost all of it) and it was all C++ on the satellite. We ran linux with preempt_rt.

We wrote everything from low level drivers to the top level application and the corresponding ground software for commanding and planning as well. Going forward, we're writing everything top to bottom, just to simplify and have total ownership since we're basically there already.

For testing we hit it at multiple levels: unit test, hardware in the loop, a custom "flight software in test" we called "FIT" which executed a few different simulated mission scenarios, and we tried to hit as many fault cases as we could too. It was pretty stressful for the team tbh but they were super stoked to see how well it worked on orbit.

A big one for us in a super high resolution mission like this is the timing determinism (low latency/low jitter) of the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) thread. Basically it needs execute on time, every cycle, for us to achieve the mission. Getting enough timing instrumentation was tough with the framework we had selected and we eventually got there, but making sure the "hot loop" didn't miss deadlines was more a function of working with that framework than any limitation of linux operating well enough in a RTOS fashion for us.

Moving fast to make launch, we had missed a harness checkout step that would’ve caught a missing comms connection into an FPGA, and it was masked because our redundant comms channel made everything look nominal.

On orbit, we fixed it by pushing an FPGA update and adding software-level switching between the channels to prove the update applied and isolate the hardware path — which worked. Broader lesson, it is possible to design a sw stack capable of making updates to traditionally burned-in components.