The PROVES Five mission is a lean, low-cost, multi-satellite CubeSat program that developed and tested flight software for five spacecraft in five months. Operating under a compressed timeline, the team, spanning 5 Universities, focused on flight-critical functionality, rapid testing, continuous-integration, and open source tooling to deliver reliable software in a compressed timeline. The results of this effort have been pushed back to Open Source creating a reliable Free and Open Source (FOSS) hardware and software stack for space missions. Building on NASA JPL’s Open Source F Prime framework and the Linux Foundation’s Zephyr Real Time Operating System, the PROVES team proved both rapid development in a historically slow field, and demonstrated solid architecture in a resource-constrained environment.
We will walk through the development, management, and triaging process that enabled rapid development across many institutions. We will explore the architecture and understand how Open Source technologies enabled our speed and reliability. We will cover testing and risk-analysis strategies to compress testing timelines. Finally, we will present our lessons-learned and we will speak to PROVES’ place in the larger open source community both through the projects we contributed to, and our new Open Source project.
