ISISPACE Group

April 27, 2021 @ 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM|

April 28, 2021 @ 7:00 AM – 8:00 AM – EU/Asia | 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM

April 29, 2021 @ 7:00 AM – 8:00 AM – EU/Asia | 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM | 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Virtual Exhibit Booth: https://calpoly.zoom.us/j/89020493339?

One of the founders of ISISPACE and currently the CEO of the company. His responsibilities include:

Strategy
Business Development and Institutional Markets
Internal Technology Roadmapping
Company Finance

One of the founders of ISISPACE and Director of the company. His responsibilities include:

Marketing and Sales
ISILAUNCH Services
Strategy Development

Business Developer at ISISPACE, background in Space Systems Engineering. His responsibilities include:

R&D collaborations
Satellite Platform and Turn-key Space Mission Sales

Experienced in technical sales and science missions, with background in Aerospace engineering. His responsibilities include:

Custom satellite buses
Turnkey satellite missions
Capacity building programs

About ISISPACE Group

ISISPACE Group is a vertically integrated small satellite company, focused on providing high value, cost effective space solutions by making use of the latest innovative technologies. The company specializes in satellites ranging from 1 to 30 kilograms, providing contract research, innovative small satellite parts, sub-systems, platforms and turnkey space solutions to a broad range of customers. Based in Delft, Netherlands – ISISPACE employs over 125 specialists and maintains a development branch office in Somerset West, South Africa.

The vertical integration of nanosatellite activities within ISISPACE Group ensures that customer specific requirements can be accommodated, and flight hardware delivered quickly when customers are faced with a short delivery schedule. A large multi-disciplinary team enables the company to provide hands-on training for its customers, often in cooperation with educational partners in small satellite engineering. Through ISILAUNCH, its launch services subsidiary, it launches all sizes of small satellites. More info here.

Brochures

Would you like to know more about our solutions? Take a look at our brochures here!

Tango Project

The TANGO mission concept developed by a consortium including ISISPACE Group as mission prime, and partners Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and 3D PLUS. The pair of 16U spacecraft host complex atmospheric science instruments for the monitoring of CH4 and NO2 emission on an urban or industrial scale. The spacecraft bus features redundant avionics for fault tolerance. This is seen as a major step in improving the robustness of spacecraft that use CubeSat and COTS-based equipment.

News at ISISPACE Group

ISISPACE selected to develop 12-Unit CubeSat platform for emerging Quantum Key Distribution mission

The Netherlands launches its first military nanosatellite

CubeSim - Satellite Simulator

CubeSim is an ISISPACE tool aimed at empowering satellite flight software development and testing, as well as making it entirely hardware independent. Software development is unfortunately too often hindered by hardware late-deliveries or low-availability. In addition, debugging on embedded hardware does have limitations in terms of debugging features and backtracing. Hard faults on embedded systems are often hard to catch and analyze, especially during software long-duration testing.

Approach

In a satellite, flight software runs on the OBC (on-board flight computer). The OBC in turn brokers memory and communication interfaces so that software can interact with radios, payloads and data.
Most of the code composing flight software is actually portable, which means that it could run on any platform – OBC or PC – as opposed to the CPU peripherals which are very specific to the chip being used.
The philosophy of CubeSim is to take advantage of that portability and simply replace or wrap the portions that are not. The diagrams below shows general FSW architecture, where OBC platform-specific libraries are replaced by a completely API-compatible set of libraries made to run on a PC. This way, flight software can be compiled either for an OBC or a PC running Windows/Linux.

That way, our embedded software engineers become able to run and debug flight software from their PC, benefitting from best-in-class development tools for multi-threaded environments, memory analytics and code coverage.

In-place library replacement

Regarding the replacement of hardware-specific parts of the software – hence non-portable – several options are available and offer different advantages, mostly regarding serial drivers:

Using USB-to-UART or USB-to-I2C adapters enables the development of software drivers and connecting to real hardware, locally or remotely,
Simulating fully or partly a device for pure software simulation, or fault injection,
Using empty function calls,

Deep functional analysis

The most difficult part of software testing often relies in functional testing, since it cannot be carried by unit testing and relies on sensors / actuators in a closed-loop-system.
Complete satellite mocking can in this case become a very efficient way of testing the behavior of the system:

Physics of the space environment is simulated,
Sensors use a model accounting for the physics propagator state,
Actuators also use a model and provide inputs to the physics propagator,

In this scenario, any satellite parameter can easily be exposed to the user in a way that it can be deeply analyzed and understood, taking into account its past and its evolution.
Tabulated outputs are generated and allow using analysis software to verify a healthy behavior in any simulated start conditions (eclipse, high spin rates, etc.).