Toward software-based safety systems in space

Abstract

Space exploration missions became increasingly complex in past decade with new emerging capabilities such as sample returns from various celestial bodies and rovers. As many engineering constraints apply to deep space missions in terms of mass, size and energy, an increasing amount of system functionalities for housekeeping or science purposes is implemented in software. The development in other industrial domains requiring high-integrity software suggests that safety-related functions (both for protecting humans from hazards as well as for protecting the mission) will increasingly be implemented in software. This requires the software systems to become safer and more reliable than today.