The objective of this activity was to merge the results of the previous contract with a parallel study by GMV. The consortium included Deimos Engenharia S.A., GMV Defence and Space S.A.U. and PICOSATS S.R.L. as prime and science lead. Deimos side of the project was entirely contributed by Jose Barbosa.
The activity was very successful in proposing a merged general infrastructure for End-to-End Simulators (E2ES) of Space Science missions. This infrastructre promotes reuse, standardisation and reduction of engineering costs by defining a products/science validation process throughout the lifecycle of science missions E2E simulators.
After an overview of Space Science missions and instruments was performed, a Model Based Engineering approach was used to define the proposed SS-E2ES Reference Architecture by first specifying the E2ES Requirements Baseline (RB), then a Reference Architecture (RA) and an associated library of Building Blocks (BB).
E2E Simulator chain as proposed in the final Reference Architecture
The completed RA was applied to a real mission, ARIEL, to assess its usefulness. By applying the SS-E2ES requirements and the SS-E2ES RA to this mission, it was possible to analyse the advantages and disadvantages of this approach with respect to a typical E2ES development. A list of recommendations and a roadmap for future activities were provided.