Software

Astris Aerospace has extensive experience in the rapid development of highly accurate and cost effective real-time GNC flight code for space. Our staff have written flight code that has flown on satellites that have launched and are now operated by Kepler Communication, GHGSat Inc., HawkEye 360, just to name a few. Our in-depth expertise allows us to be less reliant on automatic code generators and academic resources. By leveraging our past experiences and applying modern software engineering principles (unit tests, code sanitizers, continuous integration) we deliver state-of-the-art code that is both reliable and flight-worthy. This approach also enables us to issue code releases updated to satisfy specific customer needs.

A wide array of autonomous features are built into the flight code to reduce the operational costs including, but not limited to, intelligent mode changes, guidance trajectory construction and, error handling and fault detection. The technical layout of our foundational flight code is shown below. Prior to on-orbit validation, our software is tested rigorously in-the-loop in our high-fidelity in-house GNC simulator, STELAR.

Many of the low-precision variants of our flight code algorithms have been released open-source for the broader engineering community as part of the ACS Toolbox project. These have demonstrated to be useful for the academia, university-affiliated labs and NewSpace companies seeking to expand their on-orbit experience.