Operational Spacecraft Simulators provide a high-fidelity software simulation of a real spacecraft. They are used to support the training of flight control teams, validation of flight control procedures and the troubleshooting of anomalies during real operations.
Telespazio Germany has a long history in building operational spacecraft simulators for various European customers, including a large number of science missions operated by the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt.
Simulation technology developed by our team is used across all of Europe’s space industry
BepiColombo on its way to Mercury
One of the recent missions that our team has been supporting is BepiColombo, currently on its way to its destination: Mercury. In parallel with the development of the spacecraft, we have developed a representative simulator of the spacecraft, including emulators of its six on-board computers. These emulators run the real software of the mission, and hence, ensures that our simulator is not only representative during a launch, but can also be updated with software patches, just like the real spacecraft. In addition to this challenging simulation of several computers running in parallel, we have developed a dedicated, accurate thermal model to allow the simulation of thermal effects. These are crucial for the mission due to its orbit coming so close to the sun.
Exploring Mars with Orbiter and Rover
The ExoMars project consists of the Trace Gas Orbiter, already in orbit around Mars, and a Rover Surface Platform still to be launched. For both satellites, we are developing and maintaining the operational spacecraft simulator to ensure that the Flight Control Team can safely practice each possible scenario during the missions lifetime with a simulator, before sending the commands to the real satellite.
The Galileo Consetellation
The ever-growing constellation of Galileo satellites developed and operated under control of the EU pose additional challenges to the simulation domain. In addition to running a number of similar, but different spacecraft simulators for the different variants of Galileo satellites already launched, the Constellation Simulator needs to be able run the simulators of various (or all) satellites concurrently. Further, elements of each Galileo satellite are classified and cannot be re-developed in software (outside of a secure area), so the Galileo Constellation simulator has to replace a simplified functional model of a secure unit by the real hardware unit (“Hardware-In-The-Loop”).
The ECSS Simulation Modelling Platform (SMP)
About two decades ago, our developers realised that existing space industry standards did not allow efficient re-use of models across missions. We submitted an idea as an ESA-funded study (XASTRO – using XML technology in space), which, over many years and several follow-up studies, projects and working groups, first led to the Simulation Modelling Platform (SMP) specification (widely used within ESA), and later to the ECSS E-ST-40-7 SMP. Our staff are still key members of the corresponding working group to further enhance SMP.
The SIMULUS Simulation Infrastructure
The availability of SMP2 (and now of ECSS SMP) has significantly improved the processes used in simulators developed for ESOC. This has led to a continuously growing library of Generic Models (GENM) that can be used on many or all ESA missions, and to a Reference Architecture for such mission simulators (REFA). Both GENM and REFA have been developed by our experienced team and are being improved further in a running maintenance and evolution contract. Together with the models, we also maintain an Integrated Development Environment that highly automated the development of models, simulators and their corresponding tests, as well its documentation.