Celebrating Twenty Years of Core Flight Software
The Past Powering Our Return to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond
In 2004, Goddard software engineers made a practical decision when working on two concurrent missions that has shaped not only how NASA missions operate but has also how the global community approached the exploration, research, and commercialization of aerospace.
“Twenty years ago, core Flight Software (cFS) came out of need,” said Program Manager Dr. Ashok Prajapati. “We were working on a mission, but then a second mission came up. We were tight on a deadline and didn’t have enough time or people to work them separately. We decided to find out if there was anything in common between the two missions to create a software that answered common needs of both.”
The two missions at the time were the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). SDO was designed to understand the Sun’s impact on Earth and Near-Earth space. LRO, which still orbits the Moon, created a 3D map of the Moon in order to identify future landing sites and resources, including deposits of water ice shadowed in polar craters. Both missions are still active today. The decision to create software that was generic enough that engineers could adapt its use to many different missions to avoid having to design what each mission needed from scratch revolutionized mission design. Now mission designers had a platform and a project independent, reusable software framework, as well as reusable software applications such as core Flight Executive (cFE), an application and run-time environment that provides a set of core tools including Software Bus (messaging), Time, Event (alerts), Executive (startup and runtime), and Table services, as a time and cost saving starting point.
“The branch started using cFS on every mission because it worked so well, was easy to use, and was high quality,” said now-retired Program Manager Jay Bugenhagen. “cFS has been used on more than 40 missions and is a standard across Goddard, NASA, and industry.”
“[With the success of SDO and LRO], the takeaway was, ‘oh this was a great idea let’s try this for other missions,’ and that’s how all subsequent missions were handled,” Dr. Prajapati said. “The software was improved over time as issues came up and needed to be solved. In the last twenty years, cFS has become so popular it has been used in everything from small scale cube satellites to James Webb Space Telescopesized missions. cFS has become popular around the globe and is used not only by NASA but by other agencies, commercial partners and foreign government agencies including Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, and United Arab Emirates Space Agency [to name a few.]”
Intuitive Machines’ success as the first ever private moon-landing mission is one example of a commercial project that used cFS. In February of this year, the Odysseus spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface. Intuitive Machines Chief…