Development of Flight Software for Small Explorer Spacecraft

A report describes a continuing program of development of flight software for the attitude-control system (ACS) and the command-and-data-handling (C&DH) system of a prototype standard spacecraft of the Small Explorer (SMEX)-Lite class. Both the C&DH and ACS parts of the software are designed to run on a single reduced-instruction-set computer (RISC) with a peripheral component interface (PCI) bus architecture. The software consists of VxWorks tasks written in C++. Various components of the software have either been developed anew or redesigned from heritage code written for prior spacecraft missions.