ESA Open Invitation to Tender AO9856
Open Date: 05/06/2019
Closing Date: 30/08/2019 13:00:00

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 19.132.02
Prog. Ref.: Technology Developme
Budget Ref.: E/0901-01 – Technology Developme
Special Prov.: AT+BE+CH+CZ+DE+DK+EE+ES+FR+FI+GB+GR+HU+IT+IE+LU+NO+NL+PL+PT+RO+SE
Tender Type: C
Price Range: 200-500 KEURO
Products: Satellites & Probes / On-board SW / Libraries / Other
Technology Domains: Onboard Data Systems / Onboard Data Management / Onboard Networks and Control/Monitoring
Establishment: ESTEC
Directorate: Directorate of Tech, Eng. & Quality
Department: Systems Department
Division: Software Systems Division
Contract Officer: Singer, Anze
Industrial Policy Measure: N/A – Not apply
Last Update Date: 05/06/2019
Update Reason: Tender issue

The use of ECSS-E-ST-50-15C protocol as command and control bus for space applications is likely to increase in the following years. Implementation and lessons learnt from ongoing projects have already generated a list of new feature/corrections to be implementedin the current standard. Canbus provides great advantages with respect to traditional satellite command and control buses in terms of power consumption, development cost and number of nodes on the network. Its use has been beneficial for small platforms with limited power availability as well as big telecom platforms with great number of nodes on the network.The availability of space-grade microcontrollers offers the possibility to distribute the intelligence of the spacecraft and run SW on remote terminals, payload units, thus reducing the complexity of the CSW running on the main platform OBC.Under those assumptions, the development of a SW implementation of the ECSS-E-ST-50-15C protocol on canbus targeting the space-grade microcontrollers seems extremely beneficial. The implementation shall be configurable by the final users, allowing them to select those protocol services suited for their needs. The implementation shall be optimized to reduce its processing load and memory footprint on the processor.This activity encompasses the following tasks:- Perform a survey of current use of CAN in missions (mission needs and used HW configuration, i.e used protocol, processor/micro processor, network topology, performance needed, plus lesson learned) and of the available space-grade microcontrollers and propose a representative development platform- Perform an architectural design, providing estimations of data throughput capabilities, as well as processing load and memory footprint under different communication protocol configurations- Implement and verifythe a representative SW stack with ECSS-E-ST-50-15C protocol and functionalities on canbus on the selected platform.This activity will make available a generic SW building block that can be reused across missions. Canbus usage directives, with specific requirements to be applied depending on the mission needs, will be the main activity output.