sat-rs/satrs-book/src/design.md

Framework Design

Satellites and space systems in general are complex systems with a wide range of requirements for both the hardware and the software. Consequently, the general design of the framework is centered around many light-weight components which try to impose as few restrictions as possible on how to solve certain problems.

There are still a lot of common patterns and architectures across these systems where guidance of how to solve a problem and a common structure would still be extremely useful to avoid pitfalls which were already solved and to avoid boilerplate code. This framework tries to provide this structure and guidance the following way:

1. Providing this book which explains the architecture and design patterns in respect to common issues and requirements of space systems.
2. Providing an example application. Space systems still commonly have large monolithic primary On-Board Softwares, so the choice was made to provide one example software which contains the various features provided by sat-rs.
3. Providing a good test suite. This includes both unittests and integration tests. The integration tests can also serve as smaller usage examples than the large satrs-example application.

This framework has special support for standards used in the space industry. This especially includes standards provided by Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) and European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS). It does not enforce using any of those standards, but it is always recommended to use some sort of standard for interoperability.

A lot of the modules and design considerations are based on the Flight Software Framework (FSFW). The FSFW has its own documentation, which will be referred to when applicable. The FSFW was developed over a period of 10 years for the Flying Laptop Project by the University of Stuttgart with Airbus Defence and Space GmbH. It has flight heritage through the 2 mssions FLP and EIVE. Therefore, a lot of the design concepts were ported more or less unchanged to the sat-rs framework. FLP is a medium-size small satellite with a higher budget and longer development time than EIVE, which allowed to build a highly reliable system while EIVE is a smaller 6U+ cubesat which had a shorter development cycle and was built using cheaper COTS components. This framework also tries to accumulate the knowledge of developing the OBSW and operating the satellite for both these different systems and provide a solution for a wider range of small satellite systems.

sat-rs can be seen as a modern port of the FSFW which uses common principles of software engineering to provide a reliable and robust basis for space On-Board Software. The choice of using the Rust programming language was made for the following reasons:

1. Rust has safety guarantees which are a perfect fit for space systems which generally have high robustness and reliablity guarantees.
2. Rust is suitable for embedded systems. It can also be run on smaller embedded systems like the STM32 which have also become common in the space sector. All space systems are embedded systems, which makes using large languages like Python challenging even for OBCs with more performance.
3. Rust has support for linking C APIs through its excellent FFI support. This is especially important because many vendor provided libaries are still C based.
4. Modern tooling like a package managers and various development helper, which can further reduce development cycles for space systems. cargo provides tools like auto-formatters and linters which can immediately ensure a high software quality throughout each development cycle.
5. A large ecosystem with excellent libraries which also leverages the excellent tooling provided previously. Integrating these libraries is a lot easier compared to languages like C/C++ where there is still no standardized way to use packages.